Something to Sing About

Another of the movies that I recently watched off the DVR was Something to Sing About. It's available on DVD, so now's the time to do the review on it.

James Cagney plays Terry Rooney, a bandleader in New York who is in love with the band's singer, Rita Wyatt (James Cagney). He's become well-known enough that Hollywood wants to bring him out to do a movie, an offer he's accepted.

He's met at the train station in Los Angeles by studio PR man Hank Meyers (William Frawley), who brings him to the studio to meet the big boss Regan (Gene Lockhart). Regan's underlings in the make-up, costume, and dialogue departments think Terry is going to fail because he doesn't have the look or sound of a Hollywood star, but Regan puts him into a movie anyway, opposite the studio's foreign discovery, Steffie Hajos (Mona Barrie).

Regan realizes that the camera loves Terry and that Terry is going to be a big hit, which is unsurprising considering James Cagney's screen charisma. But the last would-be star Regan brought in let the potential of success go to his head, so Regan doesn't want anybody to tell Terry just how good he's going to be. Of course, this is going to leave Terry disillusioned and thinking he's beeen a failure in Hollywood.

If only he had waited for the movie to premiere before skipping town all would have been well. But he left right after production wrapped because he wanted to marry Rita. The two flee to San Francisco to get married and then take off on a South Seas cruise for their honeymoon, while Regan goes nuts looking for Terry when the previews of the movie predictably make a success out of Terry at least if he shows up again.

Terry does return, and the studio wants to sign a contract, but there's a catch. The studio wants to market Terry as a romantic lead, but fear that the female audience won't be as accepting of this if they know that Terry is married, so Regan has a clause in the contract barring Terry from getting married, not knowing that Terry is in fact already married. They eventually agree that Rita will play the part of Terry's personal secretary, living in an outbuilding at Terry's Hollywood escape.

But it's not that simple. The studio decides to market Terry and Steffie as a romantic couple like Powell and Loy or some such. You can guess what's going to happen next, which is that Rita gets uncomfortable with Terry's obligations with Steffie, while Steffie, not knowing that Terry is already married, tries to make things more serious. It threatens to screw up everything.

Something to Sing About is a movie that's interesting for a whole bunch of reasons, even if it isn't exactly great. There's another backstage look at Hollywood, this one bringing up echoes of the later Singin' in the Rain what with the the romantic triangle, as well as the dialogue coach scene.

Also really interesting was the character of Ito, played by Philip Ahn. Ito is given a job as Terry's dresser, and is made to be the stereotypical Asian manservant you'd see in Hollywood movies of the era. But it's revealed that Ito came to Hollywood to be a star, and never made it (unmentioned, but obviously because Hollywood wouldn't have known what to do with an Asian lead at that time). Ito, in fact, speaks better than everybody else and only does the accented shtick because a previous boss explicitly asked for it! I was very surprised that a Hollywood movie of the era would have such a sympathetic portrayal of an Asian man.

But, as I said, there are also problems with the movie. One of the problems is also one of the things that makes the movie interesting. Cagney had left Warner Bros. to try to get better roles, and made Something to Sing About and one other movie at upstart Grand National Pictures. The movie looks as though it's made at a mid-range studio; it's frankly the sort of thing that MGM would have handled well and would have been right up their alley.

The movie has other problems. One is that the story is really rather pedestrian, and we can figure what's going to happen a mile away. There's also the casting of Evelyn Daw as the singer. She's got a Jeanette MacDonald voice, which may not be to everybody's liking and is also absolutely not the right type of voice for the songs in the movie. She does fine in the acting part of her role, but every time they have a musical number it really drags the movie down.

Still, Something to Sing About is definitely worth one watch thanks to James Cagney's presence.