Calypso Heat Wave

Another Sam Katzman Special which somehow manages to work. A mobbed-up jukebox operator goes into the song production business and turns out to have a knack for finding talent.

A large part of the movie's success is due to the effective and subtle camera work of Benjamin Kline, a man who worked as cinematographer for fifty years, for talents as diverse as Tom Mix and the Three Stooges. In this one he gives you a lot of long, leisurely takes with a slowly moving camera during the story scenes and then switches tempo effectively for the musical numbers.

A kind word should also be reserved for director Fred Sears, who averaged five movies a year and had a busy acting career going -- and died in his mid-forties the year he made this. The decent performances he gets out of poor actors indicates, as few others of his cheapjack movies do, that had he lived longer, he might have turned into a very good director.

There's also a chance to play 'spot the talent'. Try to find Joel Grey a decade before his Broadway breakout in CABARET and even Maya Angelou. It's amazing the talent that Katzman could pick up on the cheap -- even when he couldn't think of what to do with it.