Heaven knows you couldn't get away with this stuff today, but the songs are catchy, there's some fine dancing, and among the large roster of early talkie musicals, this one's fairly diverting. The chorus girls are beefy and klutzy (Betty Grable's in there somewhere), the production design's clever, and there's an odd lighting effect that turns actors from blackface to white with the flick of a light switch. Corbett is a personable interlocutor Will Rogers, Warner Baxter, and George Jessel do cameos and poor old Charles Evans' show boat gets saved. Marjorie White does some hot scat singing and steps lightly Ann Pennington and Dixie Lee dance up a storm Victor McGlaglen and Edmund Lowe do a buddy number (McLaglen can actually sing, Lowe can't) the boxing champ James J. You have to endure some badly dated acts, including the insufferable El Brendel and the sappy Janet Gaynor (she doesn't sing, she coos) and Charles Farrell (body of Adonis, voice of a fifth grader), but along the way you do get some good stuff, and an entertaining look at what was considered top-notch diversion around the time the stock market was crashing.
The sitcom chronicled the lives of a middle-class Milwaukee family in the 1950s (via IMDb ), and its romanticized nostalgia hit home with audiences still reeling from the Nixon era. Lavish story-revue from 1929, originally filmed in a widescreen process called Grandeur, puts most of Fox's roster in a minstrel show format there's a plot surrounding it, but it's forgotten after the first half hour or so. For 10 memorable years, 'Happy Days' ruled the airwaves, and anyone who watched it can still hum both of its theme songs (yes, there were two).
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