Nora Bayes

There's been a couple of days in the past year or two where the TCM lineup has been a bunch of musical biopics, of which there seem to be more than I realize. And here, by musical biopics I mean biographical movies of mostly composer/songwriter types; not movies about famous people that have for some reason been turned into musicals. Well, tomorrow, June 5, is another such day, and once again I've got one of the movies in the TCM lineup on my DVR just waiting more me to do a post on it. That movie is Shine on, Harvest Moon, which airs at 9:30 AM.

Shine on Harvest Moon is the purported story of the two people credited with writing it, Nora Bays (Ann Sheridan) and Jack Norworth (Dennis Morgan). They're certainly the ones who made the song a popular standard, although apparently in those days it was common practice for someone to buy all the rights to the song including being credited as the songwriters. As the movie opens, it's around 1905 in Milwaukee. Vaudeville is the big thing, and Jack is a single act in a traveling vaudeville show, as is Blanche (Irene Mallory), who is presented as someone you think is going to become romantically involved with Jack. Also in the show are the magician Georgetti (Jack Carson) and his ditzy assistant Margie (Marie Wilson) who eventually get married and become friends of Jack and Nora's, showing up several times throughout the movie.

Nora is only seen a bit later, when Jack sees her performing at a cabaret and realizes she'd be pefect for the sort of songs he's trying to get published. What he doesn't know is that Nora is being pursude by Dan Costello (Robert Shayne), who ones the place where Nora is performing. Nora resists Dan's advances, while Jack resists Blanche's, and Jack and Nora go off together, in part to do their own vaudeville act and in part for Jack to write songs for Nora to sing.

But what the two don't know is that they've made some powerful enemies. Costello becomes more and more successful as a producer and theater owner, while Blanche seems to become somewhat successful as a performer and wants to make certain that Jack sings with her. With that in mind, Dan pretty much blacklists Nora which effectively means blacklisting Jack too unless he wants to give in and do a double with Blanche or have her sing his songs. Even a good friend like "Poppa" Carl (S.Z. Sakall) can't help get them bookings. Oh, he does get them an audition, but Dan finds out before the scheduled time leaving Jack and Nora to audition for an empty theater.

Eventually Nora gives up and leaves Jack so that he can have some success, but we know the movie is going to have a happy ending, so Poppa Carl figures out a way to get Jack to bring Nora into the act that Dan and Blanche can't stop. They then perform the title song as well as another number, "Time Waits for No One", in a Technicolor finale (the rest of the movie is in black and white), before living happily ever after.

Or at least the movie Shine On, Harvest Moon would have you believe. Jack and Nora would get divorced and go on to have multiple spouses, while as mentioned above there's a question as to whether they even wrote the song. Indeed, the songs in the movie are mostly a pastiche of stuff from the first decade of the century. It's another of those movies that tries to bring turn-of-the-century nostalgia to audiences who were spending their time outside the theater worrying about the war raging over in Europe and the Pacific, having been released in the spring of 1944. Audiences of the day might have liked it, but it's one that, unlike Roughly Speaking, hasn't aged very well.

Roughly Speaking

Tomorrow, June 4, is the birth anniversary of actress Rosalind Russell, so it's unsurprising that TCM is going to be spending a morning and afternoon with her films. One that I hadn't seen before but that was on my DVR was Roughly Speaking, so as is always the case, I watched it in order to be able to write up this post for the upcoming TCM showing.

The opening credits inform us that the movie is based on the then-popular autobiographical memoir of the same title, Roughly Speaking, but author Louise Randall Pierson, who also wrote the screenplay and was credited as a technical advisor on the movie. Fast backward to 1902. Louise Randall (to be played as an adult by Rosalind Russell) is the younger daughter of John Chase Randall (Ray Collins), who unfortunately has just up and died a few weeks after his 25th anniversary leaving behind a wife and two adolescent daughters. Worse, he also leaves behind a mountain of debt, which forces Mom to sell off most of the family's remaining assets and the family to downsize rather severely.

Dad wanted Louise to get an education and shoot for the stars, but this is New Englans in the early 1900s, so Louise goes off to "business school", the sort of place that taught young women to become typists and other secretarial work, something that Louise takes very well to. She gets a probationary job (Alan Hale in a one-scene cameo is her boss) which is a springboard to a nicer position in New Haven, the home of Yale University. There's the possibility of finding a nice Yalie to get married to!

Sure enough, Louise meets nice Rodney Crane (Donald Woods), who is hoping to go into a career in finance as his father was a bank officer. The two have a whirlwind romance and get married, with Louise rather progressively for the time keeping her name. The two live happily, although not ever after. The couple have four kids before World War I comes along. After that comes the family moving out to the suburbs, only for the kids to get polio to varying degrees. Louise remains impossibly perky through all of this. So perky, in fact, that when Rodney loses his job in the post-war recession, it's then that he's had it with Louise's optimism, leaving for another woman. Louise is the one to seek a divorce, which is on rather amiable terms, and Rodney is never to be seen again.

In any case, Louise is able to find another man in the form of Harold Pierson (Jack Carson). Harold is the playboy son of a horticultural magnate; technically he works as a vice-president for Dad's rose greenhouses but he's never going to advance any further. Harold and Louise are a perfect match in that they'll always love each other for richer or for poorer, but with their personalities leading to it always being for poorer. They have another kid (future Oscar-winning screenwriter Frank Pierson), and go through a series of ups and downs. Harold builds his own greenhouses just in time to flood the market to such an extent that they can't pay the mortgages. He then gets a job promoting a new airplane (character actor John Qualen is the designer), again just in time for the Depression to hit.

Still the couple perseveres, until the New York World's Fair of 1939 arrives and presents another opportunity. Except that in the middle of the fair, Germany attacks Poland, leading to the start of the European theater of World War II and the US getting involved a few years later. By this time there are three adult male children for Louise, and since the movie was released in 1945, you know the kids are all going to do their parts....

Roughly Speaking is another of those movies that is episodic in nature and relies much more on the strength of the actors than on the story itself. Unsurprisingly, with Roz Russell and Jack Carson you know that the stars will indeed pull it off. It also has the feel of something that was designed to be a morale-builder. It was released in January 1945, with World War II still raging. The story of a woman who suffered a whole bunch of personal setbacks and persevered is one that I can imagine would have resonated with audiences, capped with her making the sacrifice of seeing her kids go off to war.

Doing a bit of reading, it's interesting to see what liberties were taken with real life, but that's not such a big deal considering that's standard practice and for audiences 80 years on one can easily look at Roughly Speaking as though it weren't in fact about real people. It's a great example of the sort of entertainment Hollywood served up for the home front during World War II, and one you should take the chance to see.

International Velveeta

I was coming up against the day when the movies that I recorded as part of Christopher Plummer's day in Summer Under the Stars in August 2025 were about to expire, so I made the point of watching International Velvet. It's another of those movies that was released when I was a kid so remember hearing about the title but not knowing a whole lot about it; I would have been much too young to know about the original National Velvet from 1944 as well.

This is, as you could probably figure out from the title, a sequel to National Velvet, albeit set quite a few years later. Velvet Brown, all grown up and played by Nanette Newman (wife of the film's director, Bryan Forbes), is living in Devonshire together with her boyfriend but not husband, writer John Seaton (Christopher Plummer). Velvet is walking along the coast, talking about how, eight years earlier, her life changed when her niece Sarah (Tatum O'Neal) came into her life. It seems that Velvet's brother moved his family to America when Sarah was just an infant, and then Mom and Dad up and died in a car crash, leaving poor Sarah alone with no family in the US. So that's why Sarah is coming to live with her aunt and not-officially-an-uncle, although we'll call him uncle because it makes things easier to follow.

In any case, with all that upheaval in Sarah's life, losing her parents and being stripped from her friends, it's easy to see why she spends the first act of the movie being horrendously sullen and trying to run away on multiple occasions. The second time, she rides off on Pie, who was Velvet's horse that she rode to win the Grand National back in the original movie. Sarah's riding Pie as part of an attempted getaway really pisses Sarah off until she realizes that perhaps she can use horsemanship to try to get closer to Sarah. Pie has reached retirement age and gets a special ceremony for it before his last foal is born. (It's been ages since I've seen the original National Velvet but some reviewers say that the original Pie was a gelding. Good luck getting any foals out of a gelding!)

And Sarah wants that foal, dammit, even though she doesn't have the money for it. So she does odd jobs for Uncle John, at least until Velvet decides to buy the foal which is another thing that helps bring aunt and niece closer together. Sarah enjoys riding, and eventually becomes good enough at it to be entered into a local show-jumping competition. She doesn't win, but her performance brings her to the attention of Captain Johnson (Anthony Hopkins), who won an Olympic medal back in 1968 and is one of the selectors for the British equestrian team for the Olympics. He's a very tough taskmaster, but ultimately fair.

Sarah is good too, although there are multiple good riders so that Sarah's first international experience is only as an alternate. It's also a harrowing experience, as one of the horses doesn't take well to international travel. Sarah gets good enough to qualify for the next Olympics, and the final act of the movie deals with the Olympic three-day equestrian competition, which requires horse and rider to engage in three different aspects of riding: dressage, cross-country steeplechase, and show jumping.

Once again it's easy to see why someone somewhere along the way would want to take a property like National Velvet and write a story about what happened to Velvet when she grew up. However, the story we ultimately get is one that's full of plot holes (although to be fair, since the climactic Olympics are the Moscow games set a year and a half after the movie's release, there's no why Bryan Forbes could have known about the boycott). The story is also mawkish and slow at 127 minutes, with Tatum O'Neal giving a particularly poor performance. And it doesn't help that the print TCM ran is in such soft focus that you wonder whether they got a blurry print.

Maybe fans of the equestrian scene might like this one, but as for me I'm glad I checked this one off my list of movies to watch and don't have to revisit it.

Not a western, or a poker movie

One of the two-reelers that TCM ran on a Saturday morning at the end of their Saturday matinee block was an early Jack Benny short I had never heard of before: The Rounder. So I recorded it and wrote up this post for a day when I was planning on doing something like mentioning the new Star of the Month or some other shorter post on TCM programming.

This short starts with Benny, playing a man named Bartlett, doing what's supposed to be his drunk bit, stuck in a ladder and trying to get into his apartment because he's lost his key. Eventually, after some patter with a policeman, he gets in through the window, since nobody locked their windows in those days, although to be fair, this being an upper-floor window in an apartment building not directly connected to the fire escape, you'd think it would be hard for a burglar to break in without being noticed.

However, Bartlett doesn't wind up in his own apartment, but that of Ethel Dalton (Dorothy Sebastian). She's commiserating with her friend Mary (Polly Moran): Ethel was out with Mary, but saw that her boyfriend was dancing with another woman. Ethel needs a husband, or at least to be seen with the appearance of having a husband, so Bartlett's showing up unannounced is actually a good thing. Ethel asks Bartlett to pretend to be married to her and act as an escort, which Bartlett is willing to do for a fee.

But then Ethel gets a telegram from her boyfriend Alfred (George K. Arthur) saying that the women she saw dancing with him is in fact his sister. So Ethel's relationship with Alfred is back on, although of course Bartlett doesn't realize this. So things get awkward when Bartlett shows up the following afternoon and then so does Alfred, obviously knowing nothing about Bartlett.

The Rounder is one of the first films Jack Benny made where he wasn't playing himself; you may recall that he was the master of ceremonies in The Hollywood Revue where he was really able to show off his talent. Here, he's not able to do so in large part because the technical limitations of 1930 didn't quite fit with giving Benny's talky brand of comedy a fictional character. Benny, at the time, still really needed to be just behind a microphone. He'd quickly learn, of course, but this short doesn't do justice to his later talent. It's interesting to watch as a misfire, but it's not that great.

TCM Star of the Month June 2026: Marilyn Monroe

Marilyn Monroe, remembered for a scene in The Seven Year Itch (June 15, 10:00 PM)

We're into the month of June now, and that means it's time for a new Star of the Month on TCM. This time around, that's Marilyn Monroe, as today is her 100th birth anniversary. Monroe's films will be airing on the first four Monday nights in June, with the final Monday, June 29, being given over the a "Pride" film festival (and I've got a film for that day already).

Marilyn Monroe and Cary Grant in Monkey Business (June 1, 11:30 PM)

Now, Monroe famously died young, so she didn't make all that many movies, which means that unlke some other Stars of the Month, the films only take up part of the evening/overnight lineup. Tonight, for example, sees Armored Car Robbery at 2:45 AM after the final Monroe film, her debut performance in Ladies of the Chorus. And, she did a lot of her work at Fox, which probably also limited how many movies TCM was able to get the rights to, as River of No Return and All About Eve are not here along with some of the other stuff she did early in her career at Fox before How to Marry a Millionaire and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes really made her a big star by 1953.

It's not a big role, but Marilyn Monroe was clearly in The Asphalt Jungle (June 8, 11:30 PM)

After tonight's first night, the movies are relatively chronological, in that June 8 is from the early 1950s; June 15 is the middle of the decade, and June 22 the end of the 1950s and, well, Monroe's final film, The Misfits from 1961. But at only 13 films, it's not a whole lot.

At least they included Some Like It Hot (June 22, 8:00 PM)

For some values of good, and 20 years after the news

One of those movies that shows up often enough on TCM but that I'd never really gotten around to watching is the 1947 version of Good News, which I think I'd generally avoided because it's a musical and because the male lead is played by Peter Lawford, who is not one of my favorite actors. But in any case, the last time it showed up on TCM I finally recorded it so that I could watch it before the next showing. That next showing will be tomorrow, June 1, at 9:30 AM.

The movie is based on a 1927 Broadway musical that had already been filmed once before, in 1930, and unsurprisingly set in 1927. As the opening informs us, it's the time of flappers and the Charleston, with college football being a much bigger sport than professional football in those days. Tait College, clearly on the MGM backlot, is one of those movie colleges that look like the smaller schools that dotted the midwest and where football was in fact a big deal. Tommy Marlowe (Peter Lawford) is the quarterback and captain of the football team, and as such all of the girls are interested in him.

One girl, however, who does not show interest in Tommy at first is transfer student Pat McClellan (Patricia Marshall). That's because she's come from the sort of boarding school where one learns French and where one learns to look for a man who's got a lot of money to marry. Tommy isn't loaded, while non-football player Peter Van Dyne III (Robert Strickland) is. You can tell just by the name. Worse, Pat insults Tommy in French, so that he can't understand just how she's insulting him.

Connie (June Allyson), meanwhile, is a more bookish student, working her way through Tati with a job in the school library, but also the sort of student who's just right to tutor the jocks if you're OK with having the jocks tutored by women and aren't worried about the risk that tutor and tutee might become romantically involved. Peter falls for Connie, and in many ways the feeling is mutual.

There's a problem, however, in that everybody cares about the big game, which means one, that Tommy has to be in the right frame of mind and not worried about romantic complications; and, two, that he be in good academic standing. Both of these get complicated. One is by Connie's roommate Babe thinking she's doing a good thing for Tommy by telling Pat that Tommy comes from money so that she'll be interested in him again, never mind what this does to poor Connie. Second is that Tommy fails one of his exams so that there's the question of academic eligibility. The big game comes, and it looks like Tait may lose to their rival, so everybody has to re-arrange things so that the right people can wind up together.

Along the way, there are any number of subplots about various teammates of Tommy's and their romantic issues, as well as the romantic isues of Connie's sorority sisters. Notably among the supporting cast is a young Mel Tormé. Also, this having been based on a musical, there's also a lot of musical numbers in the MGM style, with vibrant Technicolor and energetic dancing.

Having said all that, whether or not you like Good News is going to be dependent upon whether you like Peter Lawford and June Allyson on the one hand, and on the other whether the MGM musical style is your thing. I'm not the biggest fan of a lot of the MGM musicals, and Good News hasn't changed my opinion on Peter Lawford either. It's not that Good News is a bad movie by any stretch of the imagination; it's just that I'm not the sort of person MGM was trying to appeal to. If you like musicals you'll probably enjoy Good News.

Neither to have nor not to have

Warner Bros. made the movie To Have and Have Not back in 1944, which rather famously brought together Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. Some years later, the studio heavily reworked the script for a remake, called The Breaking Point. That remake shows up on TCM tomorrow, May 31, at 3:00 PM.

The action is moved from the Caribbean to the Pacific coast. John Garfield plays Harry Morgan, the captain of a charter boat working out of Newport Beach and taking rich people on fishing trips, at least when he can drum up business. That hasn't been as much as he'd like, leading him to have trouble supporting his loving wife Lucy (Phyllis Thaxter) and kids. He's even having trouble keeping the boat, as he's got payments on the boat as well as all the dock fees.

So he and his assistant Wesley Park (Juano Hernández) are pleased when Leona Charles (Patricia Neal) and her husband charter the boat to go down to Baja California for some fishing. When they get down to their destination, however, things go sour. First is that there's an obnoxious lawyer Duncan (Wallace Ford) who tries to get Morgan to smuggle stuff back to America. Worse is that Leona seems to be hitting on Harry; she is a sort of femme fatale, after all. And it turns out that not only is she not married, but the man she was with snubbed both her and Harry and Wesley by blowing all his ready cash betting on cockfighting and then drawing on his bank account to buy one plane ticket for himself back to California!

So now Harry has to go back to Duncan because he neeeds to make money. Worse is that he finds out that what he's asked to smuggle is actually humans, not any sort of inanimate contraband. And of course, both Duncan and Sing (Victor Sen Yung), the Chinese underworld boss who wants the Chinese illegal immigrants smuggled into the States, try to stiff Harry. This leads to Sing getting killed, the immigrants having to wade back to shore, and all sorts of legal complications when Harry gets back to California.

And then there's the fact that Duncan survived all of this. Leona did too, and she's still hanging around for some reason, leading Lucy to get the impression that perhaps Harry isn't being faithful with her. No wonder she's been begging him to give up the idea of being a sea captain and go into her father's lettuce farm business up in the agricultural part of California.

Finally, as if Harry doesn't have enough problems, Duncan returns, this time wantng Harry to smuggle some gangsters and their ill-gotten loot from a racetrack heist out to sea for the pick-up. Harry doesn't want to do it, but doesn't exactly have much choice considering the extent to which Duncan has been blackmailing him to this point.

I'm not the biggest fan of either Lauren Bacall or Ernest Hemingway, so To Have and Have Not isn't exactly a favorite of mine. The Breaking Point, on the other hand, feels like a more modest remake of the movie. John Garfield is just the sort of actor for this sort of role. Patricia Neal has hair dyed blonde, and frankly, it doesn't suit her. That having been said, it does enhance the sort of trashiness of the character and she also pulls her role off well. Also of note is the complete lack of mention of any "race issues" despite the Wesley Parks character being played by Juano Hernández. He's the copilot, not the man bravely confronting the racism and segregation of the day that poor Sidney Poitier had to do over and over. Everybody treats the Wesley character in what feels the same way they'd treat any ship's second officer.

The Breaking Point is definitely a movie to watch, and tomorrow is your chance.

Briefs for the end of May 2026

As I write this early on the morning of May 30, the full TCM schedule for June hasn't been released, missing the last three days. The TCM site only lets me go out through June 19. I know most channels don't go even that far out, but for TCM fans, loyal bunch that we are, it's somewhat distressing to see the deterioration in what I'd class as the customer service that people at TCM performed for the fans. I mean, these fans are the sort of people who will drop thousands to go to a TCM Film Festival or the TCM Cruise. Not that I can afford either in terms of money or time away from my elderly father who wouldn't be interested in doing such things (and, to be honest, I'm not interested in that sort of giant cruise ship either). But there are a lot of people who are, and who have looked forward to planning out the month's viewing weeks in advance.

Also, again, I'll repeat my mention that from the first 27 days of the month, there are several movies coming up that are on my DVR and where I had to reschedule other posts since I'm somewhere between three and four days ahead in terms of how far I've got posts scheduled here. So, as always, check the listings for the time that a movie is scheduled in case I've put up the post on the wrong day.

As for FXM, I've still got a couple of movies on the DVR that are in common rotation in the Retro block, notably the 1940s version of The Lodger and the surprisingly recent for the Retro block Lincoln. I also recorded Anastasia since a search of the blog suggests I hadn't done a post on it even though I watched it once ages ago. That one, somewhat surprisingly, doesn't seem to have gotten a second airing since I recorded it.

The Naked Truth

Peter Sellers was TCM's Star of the Month last September. Some years back I bought a box set that had several of Sellers' early British movies, in part for I'm Alright Jack, and have done reviews on all of the movies in that set. TCM unsurprisingly ran a goodly amount of Sellers' British work as well, but included a movie that wasn't in that box set and that I hadn't heard before: Your Past Is Showing. (Note that the movie was originally titled The Naked Truth; the print TCM ran included a card from the British Board of Film Censors with that title, but with an actual title card of Your Past Is Showing.)

Back in the 1950s in the US, there were scandal sheet magazines like Confidential that raked up dirt on celebrities. Less ethical people in the business offered to spike stories in exchance for some sort of quid pro quo or cash, a practice which is effectively blackmail. In this movie, Nigel Dennis (Dennis Price) is the publisher of a magazine called The Naked Truth that prints similarly nasty gossip and who is also the sort of man who has no compunction about blackmailing the people he writes about. We then get introduced to four such people, and Dennis' attempts to blackmail each of them:

Melissa Right (Shirley Eaton of Goldfinger fame) is a model with an American boyfriend and a shady past;
Lord Mayley (Terry-Thomas) is a respected British peer with a wife (Georgina Cookson) who has the tendency to go out chasing younger women;
Flora Ransom (Peggy Mount) is a murder-mystery writer in the Agatha Christie sense with a daughter (Joan Sims) but who may have stolen the plot to one of her big-selling murder mysteries; and
Sonny Macgregor (Peter Sellers) hosts a show that seems somewhat like You Bet Your Life, only he's not really Scottish, and he also owns some apartment buildings that aren't in particularly good condition.

Dennis, having threatened each of them (and a whole host of unseen others), leaves them with the uncomfortable decision of whether to pay up or to let their secrets be revealed. Then again, there's a third option, which might be to use other means to get Dennis to lay off. Or to make him incapable of going ahead with his plans to publish that information -- even if their plans to do so are highly illegal. Flora, being a mystery writer, decides to come up with a way of killing Dennis that won't be detcted, while Macgregor, who is also a master of disguises, has his own plans to kill Dennis. Unfortunately, both of them are less competent than they think, and poor Lord Mayley, who doesn't know anything about the other two, rather haplessly walks into these schemes.

Eventually the four, having found things out, decide that they're better off teaming up to come up with a murder that nobody will be able to pin on any of them individually. Of course, this scheme doesn't quite work either, and in fact leads to a whole new set of complications.

Your Past Is Showing is the sort of British farce that a studio like Ealing was quite good at making. Here, however, with the presence of Sellers and Terry-Thomas, things get a bit more zany. However, this doesn't always work to the movie's benefit, especially when it coms to Flora and her daughter; these two characters are way overplayed.

Overall, though, the positives outweigh the negatives of Your Past Is Showing, and it's definitely a movie that's worth watching, even if there are more sparkling British comedies of the era out there.

Carter didn't go over there

Another person who was honored in Summer Under the Stars in 2025 was Glenda Farrell. I've seen a lot of her movies since I like 30s films and she worked at Warner Bros. to whose films TCM can more easily get the rights. One I hadn't seen was the B movie Here Comes Carter.

Glenda Farrell is nominally the female lead here although we don't see her about 10 minutes in to a movie that only runs an hour. Also, she's not the love interest for the lead male. The lead male is played the titular Kent Carter, played by Ross Alexander. Carter works in the promotions department for Premier Studios, and has a personal secretary Linda Warren (Anne Nagel, Alexander's real-life wife). She's an aspiring singer, but wants to get to the big time on her own and not have Carter push her.

One of the stars Carter is expected to promote is Rex Marchbanks (Craig Reynolds), a man Carter doesn't like for some reason. So when Carter is informed that waiting outside his office is Rex's ex-wife, accompanied by a policeman who is looking for the alimony payments Rex has stiffed her on, Carter doesn't do what is supposed to be his job of smoothing over scandals like this. Instead, he lets the case go to court, and for that the studio quite rightly fires him.

It takes a little while for Carter to find new work, until he's outside the studios of radio station KLA. Their Hollywood reporter Mel Winter (Hobart Cavanaugh) is a drunkard who doesn't exactly have a successful show, so Carter offers to make the show a success. Winter's secretary is Verna Kennedy (Glenda Farrell). Carter is able to make the show a success, but it's by getting Winter off the show and replaced by Carter himself, who has an extremely obnoxious delivery.

Now, a lot of this sort of show, which I guess was in those days a sort of precursor to Entertainment Tonight, was to run puff pieces on celebrities based on what the studio press agents fed to the "gossip" columnists. Carter, having been a press agent himself, has no desire to do a show like that, and instead has that contratrian attitude, even talking about gangsters and seemingly trying to paint Marchbanks as having an in with the gangsters. Linda doesn't like Carter for this, even though she does get an audition not knowing Carter has arranged it for her.

Marchbanks goes to the gang leader, Moran, and gets Moran's henchmen to rough Carter up in an attempt to stop Carter. But Carter continues his potentially libellous broadcasts about Marchbanks. The stuff wouldn't be libellous if Carter can prove it to be the truth. But can he?

Well, of course he can, considering that he's the hero and this is one of those light Warner's B movies. Tragic Ross Alexander has no difficulty with the material here, and neither does Glenda Farrell. Anne Nagel, on the other hand, is rather bland. There's nothing particularly new going on here, just the sort of stuff you'd expect from the days when a studio had to keep churning out new stuff to keep supplying the theaters. It entertains well enough for what it is, however.