Variety Girl (1947)

On the same disc as Star Spangled Rhythm (1942), with nearly the same gimmick of a stolen identity and an all-star showcase.

But where that one was meant as wartime morale booster (with concluding flag-waving finale), this movie starts patting itself on the back on how good the big studios are about their programs to help under-privileged children.

Gee, (belated) thanks guys! You guys are swell!

From then we jump to the story of one of these abandoned children, now all grown up seeking to hit the big time. Unwisely, however, she chooses a (rather silly) stage name which is appropriated by someone else who steals her break.

She doesn’t do too bad though, (that is until she repeatedly clashes with a certain character.)

The identity thief allows her to stay (unbeknownst to her, at her rightful room,) and she is also taken to a producer’s party where she gets to perform with Spike Jones, and where she proves not only that she’s got talent, but that she’s a good sport.

This is a better structured story and movie than Star Spangled Rhythm, but probably not as much fun.

Like in that movie, a theatrical setting is used for impossible acts which require movie magic to be put together as presented. This one has a very strange, oddly toned, hijacking scene which segues into a musical act. What were these folks thinking?

Still, the film is completely worthwhile as a time capsule of (not fully realistic) inner studio workings, very specifically the self-mythologizing recording of sound in a Puppetoon Cartoon, (we now know recording sessions aren't done quite this way,) and Hollywood locations, (The Brown Derby, Grauman's Chinese Theatre., The Cocoanut Grove.)

It seems odd that despite the exposing of some movie-making trickery, (the ability to add or substitute sound, which is made explicit in the Puppetoons' segment, and which as we now know, was infamously used in several well-known features,) exploiting that same trickery is presented in the plot itself as some sort of moral deficiency not only in this feature but also in MGM's Singing in the Rain (1952).

Not to worry, we also have a studio head being hounded as a source of fun, and a scene reprising a classic James Cagney bit is really good.

Some gags involve previous Paramount Studio features; for example, at one point Ray Milland reaches into a ceiling lamp to pull out… a phone. Ain’t that a scream?

With Mary Hatcher, Olga San Juan, (a pre-Star Trek) DeForest Kelley, Frank Ferguson, Glenn Tryon, Nella Walker, Torben Meyer, Jack Norton, and William Demarest, but also Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, Gary Cooper, Alan Ladd, Paulette Goddard, William Holden, Burt Lancaster, Robert Preston, Veronica Lake, William Bendix, Barbara Stanwyck and Paula Raymond.