Mr. Dodd Takes the Air

Popular radio tenor Kenny Baker plays a naive country bumpkin who gets a chance to sing on radio and becomes a big hit, while falling for the station's secretary, Jane Wyman. I enjoyed Baker's singing of the five songs in the movie (one as a baritone that was undoubtedly dubbed), but the plot is so thin the writers introduce a subplot, which has him the inventor of a gadget that makes a $19 radio sound like a $500 one. Naturally, there's a villain (John Eldredge) who wants to steal it, and a gold digger(Gertrude Michael), who loves Baker's $1000 per week salary, helping the villain. Baker's manager, Frank McHugh, is there for comedy, while Alice Brady shows up as a famous but ditsy egotistical opera singer, a role some people may enjoy but I found totally superfluous. Michael pits herself against Wyman, who patented the gadget in her name to protect Baker, and he is so disillusioned about it all, he fakes losing his voice to return to his home town of Pewamo to work as an electrician, leaving his device and everyone back in New York. But they haven't forgotten about him.