He Found a Star

The daughter of the new Prime Minister and her husband -- Sarah Churchill and Vic Oliver -- star in this musical. He's opening a talent agency for people who never got a break, and it takes him half an hour to find a down-ad-out fellow whose song version of "Invictus" went out of favor twenty years earlier, and transform him into a novelty number, followed by real talent: basso Uriel Porter. By the forty minute mark in this movie, he's found success and lost his soul -- which means moving into sleek new offices and the Original Blonde Bombshell, Evelyn Dall -- until the smash finish, of course.

It's a surprisingly sweet musical, and reliable director John Paddy Carstairs pulls out all the stops with a variety of weird wipes for editing the big production number. Look back more than three quarters of a century, you can see the cheap B values and the attempts to cash in on current notoriety, but also the clear competence of the underlying work.