Virginia Obrien sure steals the opening scenes as she cracks jokes between lines of her own singing performance, staying completely deadpan all the while. We get a glimpse of Frank Morgan, who is trying to audition at a radio station, but doesn't get in. Aside from some good actual singing performances, there's just so much going on here, we need a score card to keep track of it all; There's the comedy bit with lead Frank Merriweather (Frank Morgan) and his butler over what they will call the butler, but it falls flat. Then there is the ex-wives routine with all the wives and grown up children, which is just confusing. Morgan's stammering, blustering, wisecracking, muttering character is just an hour and a half of vaudeville jokes, which is quite fun to watch, but doesn't really help the plot along. He actually does the "that was no lady, that was my wife!" bit during a bit with his family; See 15 year old Larry Nunn, and 15 year old Leni Lynn do a couple song and dance numbers with Morgan as he tries to get his children into show business. At the same time, Merriweather gets fired for scaring the public with a radio show that mimics one that had just happened in real life a few years prior. He spends the rest of the movie trying to get his job back at the radio station. Keep an eye out for Leo Gorcey (one of the Bowery Boys) and Donald Meeks (from the W.C. fields movies) Morgan does a zillion imitations, but about half of them are the actual actors voices... it would have been funnier to have Morgan just try to imitate them, instead of using the actual actors voices. When Morgan starts spouting Claudette Colbert from "It happened one night", it's pretty obvious that it couldn't be Morgan doing ALL the voices. Billie Burke (Glenda, the good witch) is one of the ex-wives, in her usual flitting about way. A neat trick of doubling-up on the songs here -- at the beginning of the film, and again near the end, Virginia O'Brien does stepped-up jazz versions of songs that had just been sung by someone else. Also a couple of excellent singing performances by Charles Holland, who always appears in his bellhop uniform. Have not been able to find out anything about his professional career, but what a set of lungs! It appears this film was made into a weekly TV show by NBC in the 1960s. Fun to watch Morgan, and the others do their showbiz bits, but as others have pointed out, plot line is pretty weak.
