Flippen's Frolics

Jay C. Flippen may be best remembered today from his movie roles in the 1950s, when he played a gruff and likable but ultimately corrupt authority figure. However, he came from Broadway, and earlier, radio. Before that, he was a story-telling comic on the vaudeville circuit with a manner that suggested his occasional blackface performances. At the time this movie was made, he seems to have been hosting an amateur talent show on radio -- perhaps that is an invention of this short. Some decent talent appears and it ends.

It's one of the musical shorts produced by Mentone for distribution by Universal Pictures. There were about 80 of them in the mid to late 1930s, mostly directed by Milton Schwartzwald. After the Mentone shorts ended, Schwartzwald wound up in Universal's music department.