Dixiana

Forgive my Southern accent but this one darlin' is jes' plain awful. Typical of its time,1930--the early days of the talkie--this hodgepodge of comedy and drama is a Ziegfeld-style extravaganza that mixes bad melodrama and mediocre operetta songs with lots of very pretty girls in outrageous costumes. The plot, if you choose to call it that, is interrupted on occasion with feeble comic relief, mostly by the great team of Woolsey and Wheeler trying their best to make something out of little, and by a Dutch comic, Joseph Cawthorn, speaking in a Jewish accent. (He even calls his son, the Metropolitan Opera baritone Everett Marshall, a schlemiel.) On the plus side, Bill "Bojangles" Robinson dances for three minutes, and Max Steiner ("Gone With the Wind") did the orchestrations for which he received his first screen credit. The film was a big flop and lost RKO studios 300,000 dollars. Fortunately, W&W went on to do better things, and a few years later King Kong and Fred and Ginger came along to make up that loss.