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While it is almost impossible to endure the horrible script, viewer patience is advised, because it's a thrill to see the wonderful Ethel Waters reprising her hit "Am I Blue?", then doing a segue into "Under a Harlem Moon." Her live singing, her concentration and empathetic interpretation gives one a sense of what it was like to have seen her on stage.

This short was made in 1933, the same year Ms. Waters starred on Broadway in "As Thousands Cheer" - introducing Irving Berlin's "Heat Wave," "Supper Time" and "Harlem on My Mind." It was also just after she played the Cotton Club with Duke Ellington's orchestra, introducing another of her signature songs, "Stormy Weather." If only Vitaphone had filmed those performances instead of this racist stereotype garbage.

(To give an example, the "Harlem Moon" number contains a lyric that goes, "That's why schvartzers were born.")

The 8-year old Sammy Davis Jr. is nothing short of phenomenal, giving everything he's got in several song and dance routines. It's sad to realize that racism kept him from attaining the early stardom he so clearly deserved.

TCM shows this short from time to time. If you chance upon it, try to ignore the stereotypes and enjoy the warmth, talent and dignity of two great African-American performers.

Someone taped this film from German TV for me and I was stunned to discover just how closely Billy Wilder followed the plot in creating his masterpiece "Some Like It Hot."

Wilder has commented that this film inspired him because it contained a single scene in which a pair of hungry out of work musicians joined an all-girl orchestra.

Not so!

The entire film deals with the two musicians who join an all-girl orchestra. There is a gruff older band leader, a la "Sweet Sue"; a band singer who both men fall in love with; an overnight train ride to a resort in Bavaria; much switching in and out of drag to woo the band singer, and close escapes from being unmasked.

Granted, SLIH is in every way a far funnier and better crafted film. The shift of time frame to Roaring 20s America gives it added energy as well as a period sheen that also comfortably distances the audience from the film's gender-bending humor.

Nevertheless, the two male leads in FANFAREN play 'refined' German ladies of a certain age with great comic timing, then pose as the 'cousin' and 'brother' of their doppelgaengers.

FANFAREN is a low-budget comedy, lacking the star power, production values or memorable music of its Hollywood successor.

Grethe Weiser, who plays the "Sweet Sue" role, was a venerable supporting comic actress who appeared in several of Zarah Leander 1940's spectacles. She alone provides a commanding presence here.

I wish some creative programmer would get a print of this film and screen it with SLIH, so audiences could see the similarities and differences for themselves.