Moonlight and Pretzels

Shot in just eighteen days at the old Astoria studio in New York, the title remains familiar today from Karl Freund's brief run of 30's directorial credits bookended by 'The Mummy' in 1932 and 'Mad Love' in 1935, and from Roger Pryor's entry in Halliwell and Katz. But the film itself remains absent from Maltin.

Fresh from Broadway, the perpetually smiling Pryor resembles a young, fresh-faced Milton Berle and slinky-eyed blonde Lillian Miles (who to perform "Are You Makin' Any Money?" wears one of those incredible early 30's spray-on wet-look black dresses they now seem incapable of authentically recreating even in films set during that era) resembles the worldlier Alice Faye in her early peroxide persona. (In smaller roles William Frawley looks not a day younger than when he and Freund were reunited twenty years later on the set of 'I Love Lucy'; while Bobby Watson is more recognisable here as the bespectacled diction coach in the "Moses Supposes" number in 'Singin' in the Rain' than from his intervening years spent playing Hitler.)

Dance director Bobby Connolly does wonders on an obviously tiny sound stage, while Freund still manages a few visual flourishes on his tight schedule and shoestring budget. The musical finale "Dusty Shoes" is a straight rip-off of "My Forgotten Man", but embellished with interesting (and no doubt cheap) actuality footage before arriving at a far more upbeat conclusion than its acclaimed predecessor.

The film did good business.