Gladys George is getting too mature for the studio, and they wish to buy out her contract. Her husband, Louis Calhern decides to protect her from this, and announces his retirement. Because their contracts are linked, this means she has to retire too. He goes up to Lee Patrick's school, where daughter Mary Lee is enrolled, tells her about the subterfuge, and they head down to Hollywood, where Miss George is having a nervous breakdown. Miss Lee decides to get a role in the school play written by Jackie Moran. Her acting is poor, but she's got a great voice.
These two plots are blended a bit clumsily. The youngsters, all playing children of show business parents, are ambitious, talented and a bit deserving of mockery; the older actors gets all the good lines, particularly Lloyd Corrigan as Moran's father. Although he is not credited, I suspect he punched up his lines, and journeyman director Anthony Mann did not object.
Miss Lee has quite the voice, singing four standards. She had entered the movies as a child performer in Warner Brothers' NANCY DREW series, then over to Republic, where they tried to make her a star in the mold of Judy Garland and Deanna Durbin. The effort would end the next year, and she would retire for a long marriage, dying in 1996 at the age of 71.
There had long been children's movies, but the rise of "young adult" movies was a bit more erratic. The Second World War was a big impetus; with men away fighting the war and growing prosperity -- including part-time jobs for youngsters -- there was a definite market for movie to appeal to the teen-aged audience that were not westerns. The writers and producers clearly were unsure how to deal with them, so they put older actors in to broaden the audience. Even through the 1960s, the studios would hire Buster Keaton to do so for movies about kids at the beach, in the same way that early Blaxploitation movies would have a superannuated White star in a prominent role.
