This is more of a show business drama than an actual musical comedy, although there are some light-hearted moments with veteran song and dance man Eddie Cantor and funny lady Joan Davis that will give you some laughs. "I just love that boy!", Davis keeps saying directly into the camera, and it's a bit of a distraction from the more serious elements of the plot that involves the marital problems of vaudeville team George Murphy and Constance Moore. All of these stars, as well as "other woman" Nancy Kelly, get to use their first names for their characters, with Constance Moore taking on "Ford" as her last name, obviously no relation to the great Constance Ford who played the abusive mother of Sandra Dee in "A Summer Place" and starred for years on the daytime soap "Another World". Murphy starts off in burlesque, discovers Cantor when he appears as an amateur night, helping him develop his fast moving, prancing and clapping image by telling him to move faster when the audience begins to throw fruit at Eddie. A meeting with Moore and her friend Donald Douglas in a local restaurant after the show introduces Cantor to Davis (who pinches him when he asks someone to metaphorically out of disbelief over his sudden success), and before long, they have all moved from the low class world of burlesque to the higher paid world of vaudeville which always leads to the hope of Broadway.
Murphy's character is a bit of a heel, spending time with Nancy Kelly on the night Moore gives birth to their baby, in a very tragic sequence that is quite sad considering the tone of the film surrounding these sequences. Another scene has Cantor pretending to be a serious alcoholic with his hotel room filled with booze bottles, obviously trying to get the even more troubled Murphy to go through an intervention for him to wake him up to his own problems. The sequence makes no sense, basically going into a sequence of Cantor in negotiations with Florenz Ziegfeld (off screen) to star on Broadway in "Whoopee", and a shot of the Broadway theater has "Eddie Martin in Whoopee!" on it to make it appear that it was Eddie Martin, not Eddie Cantor, who originated that part on stage. Cantor gets to recreate his hit stage role once again just as he did in the 1930 movie version, although the full movie was in color, while this is in black and white.
Among the musical highlights are Murphy and Moore's repeating of "It Had to Be You", a Hawaiian song and dance number, a comical number with Davis lipsinking to "Lucia di Lammermoor" (complete with oversized bust), the upbeat "Alabamy Bound" and Cantor repeating another hit of his, "Dinah". It's a mixed bag to say the least with no real motivations in Murphy's character for being so messed up. The story by Bert Granet is very similar to the Broadway play "Burlesque" (the subject of several Paramount films) that would be revived on Broadway right after this. Cantor and Davis, who don't really get much of a chance to do anything but play support to Murphy and Moore, would repeat their roles (given different names) in "If You Knew Susie" where they refer to their co-stars here, a confusing bit of trivia considering a sequence from this movie used in the other film.
Murphy's character is a bit of a heel, spending time with Nancy Kelly on the night Moore gives birth to their baby, in a very tragic sequence that is quite sad considering the tone of the film surrounding these sequences. Another scene has Cantor pretending to be a serious alcoholic with his hotel room filled with booze bottles, obviously trying to get the even more troubled Murphy to go through an intervention for him to wake him up to his own problems. The sequence makes no sense, basically going into a sequence of Cantor in negotiations with Florenz Ziegfeld (off screen) to star on Broadway in "Whoopee", and a shot of the Broadway theater has "Eddie Martin in Whoopee!" on it to make it appear that it was Eddie Martin, not Eddie Cantor, who originated that part on stage. Cantor gets to recreate his hit stage role once again just as he did in the 1930 movie version, although the full movie was in color, while this is in black and white.
Among the musical highlights are Murphy and Moore's repeating of "It Had to Be You", a Hawaiian song and dance number, a comical number with Davis lipsinking to "Lucia di Lammermoor" (complete with oversized bust), the upbeat "Alabamy Bound" and Cantor repeating another hit of his, "Dinah". It's a mixed bag to say the least with no real motivations in Murphy's character for being so messed up. The story by Bert Granet is very similar to the Broadway play "Burlesque" (the subject of several Paramount films) that would be revived on Broadway right after this. Cantor and Davis, who don't really get much of a chance to do anything but play support to Murphy and Moore, would repeat their roles (given different names) in "If You Knew Susie" where they refer to their co-stars here, a confusing bit of trivia considering a sequence from this movie used in the other film.