Thank Your Lucky Stars

How many lyricists can rhyme nylon with pylon? Well that’s pretty much the standard of the work from the likes of Frank Loesser and Johnny Mercer as this jolly crowd-pleaser assembles quite a formidable cast of A-listers to augment a silly vehicle for Eddie Cantor. Playing himself, he is determined to wrest control of a big show from it’s producer “Farnsworth” (Edward Everett Horton) and his composer “Schlenna” (S.Z. Sakall) who are desperate, on bended knee, for Cantor to provide Dinah Shore. In the end, they have no choice but to cave in, but as Eddie imposes his own brand of humour on the proceedings, they are soon at their wits end. Then, serendipity steps in and introduces them to “Joe”. He is the spitting image of Eddie, so if they can only swap them round then they can manage their new man and keep their old one busy elsewhere. That’s the thread of the drama, and it’s perfectly watchable as it allows Cantor to weigh in, twice, with his corny jokes. The main thrust of this feature is a series of on stage performances from an whole range of stars. Most notably, for me anyway, were Olivia de Havilland, Ida Lupino and George Tobias doing a stage routine that reminded me of “Andy Pandy”; then there’s Errol Flynn covering up for the fact that he was tone deaf by sporting a Londoner’s accent to deliver his own wartime tune forewarning the Nazis “that’s what you’ll jolly well get!”. What I found it also showed us was just how similar many of the acts actually looked. Ann Sheridan, Joan Leslie, Miss Shore - they all had a very studio “look” to them. The star of the show has to be Bette Davis who hasn’t the singing voice for a baby’s lullaby much less the big stage, but by acting her way through most of her quite wittily crafted “They’re Either Too Young or Too Old” and getting flung about enthusiastically by jitterbug champion Conrad Wiedell, she participates but remains aloof from the more pantomime elements of this musical extravaganza. I enjoyed Sakall’s bumbling performance and Cantor demonstrated that he was no slouch when it came to making himself the butt of the jokes, even if perhaps I’d have left him strapped to that undulating operating table. It’s a decent example of the efforts both Hollywood and Broadway were going to to support their military and to raise war bond capital, and though perhaps a little too long it still has just about enough variety to sustain it.