Thanks for Everything

Promoters organized a radio contest to find the average American and use him to sell food, clothing, and concepts. Everything goes well until he falls in love with a girl who upsets things.

A potentially interesting piece of satire -- Jack Haley can predict precisely the consuming habits of the nation, so Adolphe Menjou in fast-talking mode and Jack Oakie use him as a guinea pig -- gets turned into a rather silly and pointless farce. I never did care for Mr. Haley and the Milquetoast persona he displayed in his starring roles. You may enjoy him, but I always want to smack him around.

The rest of it is surprisingly in the mode of the the bright, overlit Technicolor musicals that Fox turned out in the 1940s, except there's no Betty Grable, no Alice Faye, no John Payne and the cinematography is some handsome black and white work by Lucien Andriot. Tony Martin sings three or four forgettable songs. George Barbier is the father of the ingénue and Binnie Barnes essays a tough-talking Noo Yawk accent with varying success. Except for Menjou, you can skip this one.

Adolphe Menjou, Jack Haley, Jack Oakie, Billie Barnes and Tony Martin star in "Thanks for Everything," a 1938 programmer about a poor sap (Haley) who enters a radio contest about trends and gets a perfect score. As a result, he is manipulated into working for a market research company headed by Menjou. He's dogged night and day by Oakie, who reports his opinions back to Menjou. When the president of a foreign land asks them to find out if Americans would fight if there's another war, Menjou and Haley go to great lengths to find out what Haley would do.

This is a frivolous way to spend an hour and ten minutes, and you can't go wrong listening to Tony Martin's gorgeous voice in four songs. There are some funny moments, and the acting is good. I'm afraid, however, that even at an hour and ten minutes, it seems a bit long.