Hooray for Love

I found this movie in the 1970s and it usually played on or around Thanksgiving. I love Vintage movies like My Man Godfrey and this one. It is a totally underrated movie with one of the nicest casts around. Ann Southern, Gene Raymond, Bill Robinson and Jeni Le Gon. Guess you wonder who Ms. Le Gon was. She was a woman from Chicago that was not formally taught Tap but could mimic the moves until she got a role in the movie. She and Bill Robinson does a really crisp dance together. I saw this lovely woman on television about 10 years ago. She explained how she got the part.

What I really like is the chemistry of Gene and Ann and the little loose plot and the music. When Ann Southern Sings "I'm in Love All Over Again", it kind of pulls at my heart. Actually, I want to find this movie, I really do because for some reason it hasn't been back on television in about 15 years or better!

"Hooray for Love" is a film where most of it is very ordinary and familiar. But there's also a part that is pretty amazing and it is well worth watching the movie just to see these performances.

Douglas (Gene Raymond) is a struggling performer and Broadway wannabe. He tries working at the bottom for a local radio station and is soon fired. Shortly after, he meets a bombastic braggard. 'Commodore' Thatcher (Thurston Hall) claims to know people and can get Douglas in touch with some Broadway producers. In reality, Thatcher is a schemer and he mostly is interested in Douglas' money! The Commodore's daughter, Patricia (Ann Sothern) is a singer for this production....and early on there is a meet cute with Douglas and she can't stand him...at first. The rest of the film is about the ups and downs of putting on this show despite the odds.

If all this sounds familiar, well...it is! I have seen many films like it...including various musicals from Warner Brothers (such as "42nd Street") and the MGM Rooney-Garland films. But what makes it stand out are the cameos by Bill 'Bojangles' Robinson (one of the great tap dancers of his era), Jeni Le Gon (a great tap dancer and singer) and Fats Waller (one of the finest pianists...and quite the singer). Seeing the film just for their performances wouldn't be a bad thing! Overall, I give this one a 7....the story is okay and the dancing and music is tops.

Brash college man Gene Raymond is a would-be producer of musical shows. Ann Sothern sings in a nightclub. Thurston Hall is Sothern's father, another would-be producer looking for some money to put on his show, Hooray for Love, which will star his daughter. Raymond manages to borrow a bunch of money to finance the show, and the trio set about putting on an extravaganza.

Along the way, the show is off-again, on-again. The producers may be wanted by the police. Raymond gets to be great pals with Sothern and they exchange silly dialog. ("If this hadn't have happened, I'd have never discovered what a sap I am, would I?" "Oh yes, you would. I would have told you.")

The action slows way down for a series of musical numbers shown in rehearsal. A ballet bit with the famous Maria Gambarelli is impressive but feels out of a place. It's followed by a comic relief song delivered by Pert Kelton while her manager Etienne Girardot looks on fondly and musical director Lionel Stander makes rude comments. Sadly, it's just not too funny.

Later on, we do get a real musical highlight called "Living in a Great Big Way," with Bill Robinson, Fats Waller, and an almost forgotten dancer named Jeni Le Gon who is sensational. Again, it has nothing to do with the story but it sure is fun.

The plot, such as it is, finally reaches its conclusion and provides the expected answers to questions like, Will the show go on? And Will the stars get together? Overall, it's not great but has some good moments.

Douglas Tyler (Gene Raymond) pursues Patricia Thatcher (Ann Sothern) as both a performing partner and girlfriend. She's not having any of it. He struggles to get anywhere in the business of show. The Commodore talks him into investing in a show after he realizes that it's Pat's father. The show rehersal goes horribly with the bad singing of Trixie Chummy (Pert Kelton). Doug mortgaged his family home and is in danger of losing it.

I love Pert Kelton's comedic section and Bill Robinson's dancing. I really like the first half of the story. I'm less in love with the second half. It's nevertheless pretty good.

TCM presented this the other day as a forgotten gem from the RKO vaults. Forgotten I'll give you, gem not really.

It could have been a lot better, because there's lots of talent here, all pretty much wasted. I very much enjoy seeing Ann Sothern in musicals. She had a fine voice and was a decent dancer. (See her in Follies bergère with Maurice Chevalier, for example, where she appears with him in the number that inspired the *Singing in the rain* number in the 1950s movie of that name.) Here she has no one to dance with - though Bill Robinson was on the set - and not a single decent song, though Dorothy Fields and Jimmy McHugh had and would produce good songs for other movies.

Just to put things in perspective: rhe same year RKO released this musically-forgettable picture, 1935, they also released Top Hat and Roberta with Astaire and Rodgers, the first with songs by Irving Berlin, the second with songs by Jerome Kern. Both pictures contain standards that remain part of the Great American Song Book.

Sothern's co-star, Gene Reynolds, couldn't dance or sing, evidently, so he is of no help to her. (That hadn't kept RKO from putting him in *Flying Down to Rio* a few years before, where he did no damage to a great movie musical. But there you had Astaire and Rodgers and others for singing and dancing.)

Raymond and Sothern make a nice romantic pair, but that alone can't save this movie.

Then there r the specialty numbers. Bill Robinson was a great dancer, certainly, but he doesn't get very impressive choreography here. His partner, Jeni Le Gon, gets even less. Fats Waller gets even less chance to show off his piano playing.

The other side shows make even less effect. Maria Gambarelli may have gone on to be prima ballerina with the Metropolitan Opera - not as big a deal back then as it is today - but again, like Sothern, she has no one to dance with here. She is limited to an uninteresting series of pirouettes, and so makes no impression. Pert Kelly's number is equally forgettable.

No point in summarizing the plot. It's not interesting, and previous reviewers have covered it.

I wanted to get a lot out of this movie, since it has some real talent who did great stuff elsewhere. But they don't here, so, since the music is instantly forgettable, there's no point in bothering with this.