[Dixielandjazz] Kay Kyser musicals reviewed - New York Post blog

[Robert Ringwald]

by Lou Lumenick (excerpt)
New York Post blog excerpt, April 24, 2012
RKO was initially partly owned by RCA and rarely passed up on opportunity to showcase
radio personalities featured on the latter's NBC radio subsidiary.
Oddly, the most successful of these was the now-forgotten bandleader Kay Kyser, who
scored one of the studio's biggest hits of 1939 with his first and best starring
vehicle, "That's Right You're Wrong," a hilariously meta comedy about a movie studio's
attempts to build a movie around a bandleader who can't act (this will presumably
be included in the Warner Archive Collection's second set devoted to the RKO comedies
of its female lead, Lucille Ball). Kyser played himself again in the horror-comedy
"You'll Find Out," which Warners released at retail in 2009 as part of an oddball
collection of Boris Karloff-Bela Lugosi films (the horror stars both share under-the-title
billing with Peter Lorre).
The "Kay Kyser Double Feature" recently released by Warner Archive includes his third
starring vehicle, "Playmates" (1941), which revisits the earlier comic theme of trying
to turn Kyser (for a third time accorded solo above-the-tile billing) into an actor.
This time, his agent (Peter Lind Hayes, replacing Dennis O'Keefe in the two earlier
films, which like this one were directed by David Butler) gives him the services
of no less than John Barrymore.
The Great Profile -- shown the door by RKO in 1934 after he failed to show up for
"Hat, Coat and Glove" and fresh from his comeback in "The Great Man Votes" (1939)
-- is somewhat cruelly forced to parody himself and his problems (drinking, financial
issues) in what turned out to be his final screen performance before his death the
following year. But the film does include the only record of Barrymore performing
Hamlet, aside from an abortive screen test (Kyser plays Ophelia). The cast includes
Patsy Kelly as Barrymore's agent, Lupe Velez briefly guesting on leave from RKO's
"Mexican Spitfire" series, and May Robson (by then blind but still memorizing scripts
that were read to her) reprising her role as Kyser's grandmother in her penultimate
movie before her own death in 1942.
The Kyser repertoire, which tends heavily toward novelty songs, is delivered by his
band and his regular singers, including Harry Babbitt, Sully Mason, Merwyn Bogue
(who sports an early Beatles haircut as Ish Kabibble) -- and Ginny Simms in her final
screen appearance with Kyser's band.
MGM chief Louis B. Mayer's reportedly unconsummated romantic obsession with Ms. Simms
seems a plausible partial explanation for Tim Whelan's "Swing Fever" (1943), a prime
candidate for the oddest musical ever made by that studio. Once again accorded star
billing, Kyser for the only time isn't playing himself, but a composer with hypnotic
powers who fight promoter William Gargan employs on behalf of client Nat Pendleton.
Kyser ends up leading his real-life band and singers, but without Simms, who in this
film is replaced by MGM starlet Marilyn Maxwell. Also on hand are Lena Horne, Tommy
Dorsey and an unbilled Ava Gardner as a secretary.
Kyser, who toured extensively with the USO during World War II, returned to playing
himself in two more RKO vehicles not yet on DVD, "Around the World" and "My Favorite
Spy," and had cameo appearances in MGM's "Thousands Cheer" and "Broadway Canteen."
His final acting appearance, again as "himself," was in "Carolina Blues" (1944),
recently released by the recently renamed Sony Pictures Choice Collection (formerly
known as Screen Classics by Demand and Columbia Classics) MOD program through the
Warner Archive and other websites. Ms. Simms' successor as the band's girl singer,
Georgia Carroll, appears briefly as herself. In real life, she retired after her
marriage to Kyser. In the movie, though, she marries a serviceman and is replaced
by Ann Miller in this pleasing bit of fluff. Comic honors go to Victor Moore, who
appears as six members of the same family, and the best number teams Harold Nicholas
and the Four Step Brothers.