Votez pour moi

Although the golden days of radio were long before I was born, I've always enjoyed the great radio comedians and was thrilled to see this Fred Allen movie being shown around the time of the 2008 election.

Fred Allen, who passed away in the early 1950s, was a contemporary of George Burns, Bob Hope, and Jack Benny, who pioneered the format of the sitcom in radio and later onto television. Unfortunately, Mr. Allen did not live long enough to make it into television (and he admittedly had a "face for radio", as he put it).

It is AMAZING to see how much the political parody in the movie Thanks a Million still hits the mark; the song "Square Deal Party" is a gem. If you get the chance to see this movie, don't miss it (I would recommend taping it - if you enjoy political satire, you will probably want to hear the lyrics of "Square Deal Party" again). It should be shown by the classic movie channels again WELL BEFORE 2012!!!

Fred Allen has an enjoyably sardonic, self aware delivery in this movie; it can be argued that his political satire on the radio was the first America had within that genre, if not some of the finest at that time. The Looney Tunes character Foghorn Leghorn (think the big rooster with the southern accent) is obviously based on the character Senator Claghorn from his "Allen's Allen." Fred Allen was a wordsmith who coined the phrase "low man on the totem pole" and is seriously underrated, in my opinion. Anyone who has an interest in American comedy/political satire and is not yet familiar with Fred Allen should spend a little time reading up on him and learning about a great American comedian who is sadly neglected and unknown today.

What a novel idea, have a talented group of entertainers be the opening number in political campaign rallies for a candidate to office. Which is what Ned Lyman discovers, as he and his troupe appear in a small auditorium where a political speech is to be given later on at the same theater by the candidate for governor of the state, Judge Culliman. Mixing theater people with politicians will appeal to voters, or so Ned thinks. The Judge in his run for governor of the state hasn't elicited much sympathy. Add to that a drinking problem and Ned sees a great opportunity.

Ned Lyman is a resourceful man that sees an angle in which keep the company he has assembled together and precede the aspiring candidate's spiel to the crowd. Since Judge Culliman can't get it together, Ned appeals to his star crooner, Eric Land, to read the speech to the audience. The singer becomes a hit and what's more, the political machinery behind the campaign see in him a person that can be manipulated. Are they in for a surprise!

"Thanks a Million" is a delightful comedy with music directed by Roy Del Ruth. Dick Powell, who appears as Eric Land at the height of his singing career is the best thing in the movie. Equally effective is Mel Allen, the radio personality in a rare screen appearances. Ann Dvorak is seen as Eric's love interest, and Patsy Kelly is a singer with the company and Ned's girl.

The film is entertaining as well as has an important message as the end when Eric Land unmask all the people that thought they could use him for their own personal gain.

Would be state governor "Judge Culliman" (Raymond Walburn) has a penchant for the bottle, so when he engages a band to help gee up support for his hustings and then suffers a terrible bout of "indigestion", his backers suggest that the band leader "Land" (Dick Powell) earn his cash by going on stage and extolling the virtuous of their illustrious candidate. A political speaker he isn't, but he does manage to précis the text and get enough response from the audience to convince the power that be that his knight be the better candidacy. Sure, he doesn't know anything about politics, but they can do all of that! Sound familiar? Anyway, he consults with his pal "Sally's (Ann Dvorak) and agrees to do it so long as he and his band can croon their way through the campaign. Gives what? This starts to work. The electorate are buying into his innocent integrity: he's not making loads of promises for them to know he won't keep. As the election looms, though, his personal life takes a bit of a tumble and when he is finally presented with a document that will ensure he is well and truly cuckolded on office, well he knows he has some serious thinking to do. I quite enjoyed the premise here, even if it does rather suggest the electorate aren't the sharpest tools in the box and are mostly susceptible to corrupt orators; there's a gentle chemistry between Powell and Dvorak and Walburn also delivers engagingly as the dipso who apparently managed to fall asleep whilst sitting in court! There are quite a few songs included here, a few of which were actually sung by the stars themselves, and in the end I felt Roy Del Ruth managed to juggled the light entertainment elements with the romance and the political quite effectively.

...made at Fox shortly after Darryl F. Zanuck took over the studio when he realized that Warner Brothers would always consider him just another employee. There is quite a bit of talent taken from Warner Bros. - director Roy Del Ruth and leads Dick Powell and Ann Dvorak as well as Alan Dinehart who always played less than reputable characters.

A traveling vaudeville troupe is having difficulty getting gigs and is on their way back to New York when the bus stops in a small town during a pounding rain storm. Troupe manager Ned Lyman (Fred Allen) goes inside an auditorium to get out of the rain and sees an old has been judge of a politician stumbling through a boring political speech - He is the Commonwealth Party's nominee for governor. When the rain stops everybody leaves. Nobody wants to hear what this guy has to say. So Lyman convinces the Commonwealth party leaders to hire his troupe to entertain before the judge speaks to get people in a receptive mood.

This is working out pretty well until one night the judge shows up drunk to a rally and is thus in no condition to speak. They get crooner Eric Land (Dick Powell) to give the speech for the judge and he's a huge hit with the audience. The party leaders come to Eric and ask him if he'd consider running for governor in the place of the judge. He agrees only after his girlfriend Sally (Ann Dvorak) tells him that he'll be singing on the radio and that the publicity would be a great way to get out of vaudeville and into radio for good. Besides, who would vote for a crooner for governor? What could go wrong?

Well what goes wrong is that the party boss who enlisted him has a wife who likes the material trappings of her marriage but likes to play the field, and Eric is the field she'd like to play in next. Also, Eric is actually pulling ahead of his opponent AND apparently Eric will be expected to hire a bunch of grifters into his cabinet so that they can steal from the taxpayers. How will this all work out? Watch and find out.

This film is much more sublime than Warner Brothers musicals of the 1930s after the code, many of which put lots of fast talking and flurries of action to replace the sharp edged dialogue and situations they could no longer do. Zanuck figured out how to do musicals in the time of the code - he'd do plenty in the 1940s - but at this time he didn't have the talent to do them yet. Thus all of the borrowing. This has the great feel of old time radio with what I'd even call a "cozy" scene opening the film as the troupe travels on the bus in the pounding rain one night with the movie's signature theme "Thanks a Million" playing on the radio.

If you can accept the premise: that an out-of-work crooner can be nominated for governor of a state on the basis of a single speech, there are some attractive moments in this film. Dick Powell moves beyond his ingenuous Warner Brothers musical style, and seems on his way to becoming the actor he later showed himself to be. Fred Allen replicates his sharp-tongued radio persona, and is able to provide most of the humor, even though he clearly did not have a charismatic screen presence even as real as that of Jack Benny or Eddie Cantor. The satirical treatment of small-state politics is rather heavy-handed, suggesting that there is nothing but self-interest involved. The songs are nothing special, but Powell delivers them in his usual off-hand yet convincing manner. For me, the most interesting and surprising episodes in the film were the two song and dance numbers by Ann Dvorak and Patsy Kelly. Having known Dvorak only as a performer in melodrama, from Scarface to Rebel Without a Cause, I looked closely, to see whether there was a double; but there were enough close-up shots to let one see that her dancing wasn't faked.(Whether the singing was dubbed is another matter). She was always an actress whose work I found compelling, though she never achieved top stardom at Warners; perhaps because Bette Davis was slated for some roles Dvorak might have played. Probably not a "gem", but a film many will enjoy.