marvy42

While Mabel Scott IS in the movie, she's NOT the singer, who's much too old. (Mabel would have been 17 at the time.) About 3 minutes into the film, there's the beginning of a dance sequence, in which Mabel Scott is the lead dancer; she's the only one wearing a black blouse. While mostly remembered as a singer today, Mabel Scott started her career, around 1930, as both a dancer and a singer. It's possible that the singer is Doris Rheubottom, who would have been around 33 at the time, but the singer looks even older than that. Otherwise, it's a wonderful movie and really highlights the great entertainment that Smalls Paradise offered.

This movie would have been a mega-smash in the drug-soaked 1960s when anything that made no sense at all was considered "deep". By the time this garbage was over, it had found a permanent niche in my "Worst Movies Of All Time" list.

It seemed like they hired a bunch of actors and told them to say the first thing that came into their minds. It certainly didn't help that the dialog kept switching between English and Chinese. Aside from the language, it (I hesitate to call it a "plot") bounces all over the place with little rhyme or reason. There wasn't a single character that I cared about in the least.

I'm sure that, if there really are alternate universes, the finished copies of the film were burned in all of them (except, sadly, ours).

May all their fingers turn to hot dogs. The one star was only because I liked the raccoon.

To get it out of the way at the beginning, the film was made in either late 1946 or early 1947, not 1941. We know this for two reasons: (1) In the scene in the secretary's office, there's a poster on the wall for Stepin Fetchit's movie "Big Timers", which was a 1945 film, and (2) there was no "Nellie Hill" (or "Nelle" as it's misspelled in the credits) in 1941; Nellie Harrell didn't marry Charles Wesley Hill until 1942. The acting is horrendous; fortunately, the music is really good. Not a spoiler, but ask yourself this: "how, exactly, do you know the piano player is dead?"

This movie was originally shot as "Mistaken Identity", although it's unclear if it was ever released at the time. It was then cut up, some new scenes filmed, and reassembled as "Murder With Music" (the scenes from "Mistaken Identity" were intercut as flashbacks).