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A better-than-average Warners musical short and a real charmer. The featured artist is Bernice Claire (sister of Ina Claire, who's probably best known as the "other woman" in Garbo's "Ninotchka"), who's got a quite good operetta voice. The songs by Mack David and Sanford Green are uninspired but serviceable, but the whole thing is done with a real flair for visual style and choreographer Allan K. Foster does a lot with a small chorus line and a low budget. Cinematographer Edwin DuPar does a good job of lighting and framing even though some of the sets are pretty obviously painted backdrops. The final "Old-Fashioned Cottage" scene is especially audacious in visual design and execution. This one is worth seeing if only for the awesome contortionist dancing by the Gaylene Sisters, who steal the movie out from under the principals.

"Human Trafficking" was a laudable production in its purpose — to alert the U.S. and the world to the existence of human sexual slavery and spark outrage and legal action — but it simply isn't a very good movie. The script is horribly melodramatic and, though director Christian Duguay makes an effort early on to cue us carefully as to where the various locations are, as the film progresses and the cross-cutting speeds up it becomes confusing and starts to look like it was edited in a blender. Robert Carlyle is an effective villain but he'd have been better if the role had been written more subtly; as it is, one can't reconcile the depiction of him as a careful businessman with plenty of legitimate front operations to hide behind with the psychopathic pleasure in killing and inflicting pain he's also shown as having. (Wouldn't the sheer body count among his associates start to alert people to him?) Mira Sorvino is an O.K. heroine and Donald Sutherland makes a fairly good showing as her oracle-like supervisor, even though when he says he has some regrets in his life I couldn't help but wonder if not doing the TV version of "M*A*S*H" was one of them. "Human Trafficking" is a really missed opportunity that tries to do too much — it seems to be attempting to do for sexual slavery what "Traffic" did for the international drug trade — and we see the victims suffering picturesquely but don't really get more than an intellectual feel for their plight. Besides, most sexual trafficking is on a considerably smaller, less expansive and harder-to-catch scale than the international ring depicted here (I almost expected Robert Carlyle's character to be stroking a furry white cat!).