Comedy;Musical

<p>Fred Astaire sails across the pond to meet damsel in distress Joan Fontaine and delightful (if unlikely) dance partners George Burns and Gracie Allen in a musical co-scripted by master wit P.G. Wodehouse and directed by George Stevens (Swing Time). The helium-light story concerns...

<p>This musical comedy is based upon the play Brother Rat and follows the exploits of young cadets trying to make it through Southern Military Institute and keep one-step-ahead of a stern old professor. One of the fellows must also keep his newly pregnant wife...

<p>Funnyman filmmaker Carl Reiner, who put Steve Martin, George Burns and John Candy through their comedic paces in one hit movie after another, strikes again with this warmly outrageous musical comedy. The title role gives dazzling Robert Lindsay (Hornblower, Jericho) a screen-debuting showcase that...

<p>Double trouble: Winsocki Military Institute cadet Bud Hooper has two dates for the prom: his best girl - and publicity-seeking glamour girl Lucille Ball, who unexpectedly says yes to starstruck Bud's invitation. Comedy puts its Best Foot Forward in this snappy frolic based on...

<p>With charisma, outsized singing and a fast horse, Al Jolson rides home a winner in this opened-up screen version of one of his biggest stage hits. The dynamic entertainer puts on blackface makeup to portray likable Gus, a stableman-turned-jockey who overcomes adversity and wins...

<p>Cynical newshounds cracking wise. Chorus cuties tapping Broadway tunes. A heavyweight battling his way to boxing glory. Boy-meets-girl romance. Snappy patter. Golden Era stars. For fans of classic '30s comedies, any of these elements means great fun. Well fans, Cain and Mabel has 'em...

<p>Laughs onstage, tears offstage! Playing members of a traveling theatrical troupe, a starry cast -- The Broadway Melody's Bessie Love and Charles King, plus Jack Benny, Marie Dressler and Polly Moran -- hit the road and all the right notes in an early musical...

<p>Wyoming Steve Gibson has wavy hair, a pleasant tenor and a really neat cowboy outfit. He's sure to hit it big as Hollywood's next Singing Cowboy, as long as nobody figures out Wyoming Steve is really an East Coast city slicker who's scared silly...

<p>After conquering the Borscht Belt and Broadway, David Daniel Kaminksi (Danny Kaye) got the nod from maverick impresario Samuel Goldwyn and under his tutelage soon mastered the movies as well. Kaye makes his feature film debut alongside Dinah Shore in Up in Arms (1944)...

<p><strong>Palmy Days:</strong> A young baker (Cantor) gets set up by a crew of unsavory psychics.<br />

<p>Booted out of boarding school for singing Mendelssohn in swing time, young Judy Bellaire returns to her wacky theatrical family and finds them teetering on the brink of ruin. Judy's brainstorm: put on a show starring herself and the family servants. Not the soundest...

<p>Marge and Gower Champion dance up a storm in their first starring roles in this dazzling marital musical comedy costarring Dennis O'Keefe. On the eve of their smash Broadway debut, hoofers Pamela and Chuck Hubbard (Marge and Gower Champion) find out they're expecting a...

<p>There's nothing more volatile than an idea in small-town 1895 America, especially for eager inventor Joe Belden. He's making a horseless carriage that runs on an explosive cleaning fluid called gasoline -- a "gas-o-mobile." Why, it's enough to make John Q. Citizen flip his...

<p>Man-crazy waitress Pansy Potts (Charlotte Greenwood) offers $500 for a husband. She gets Clark Gable. Well she gets his photo, a come-on to meet penniless aerocopter inventor and all-around goofball Rusty Krouse (film-debuting Bert Lahr who, wouldn't you know, doesn't look a bit like...

<p>Follow the fun, follow the fleet, Follow the Boys with four seagulls -- Navy wives and sweethearts who careen around the French and Italian Riviera in a beat-up jalopy, trying to keep up with their seagoing menfolk. After America's teens made Where the Boys...

<p>Busby Berkeley, the musical staging genius behind 42nd Street and the Gold Diggers series, bid farewell to his original Warner Bros. contract in swingin' style with tunes by Harry Warren, Al Dubin and Johnny Mercer. Now that's Golden Age name-dropping. The story is a...

<p>George White's Scandals was a Broadway sensation, a series of revues bursting with comedy, music and long-stemmed American beauties. George White's Scandals the movie celebrates that tradition with knockabout comic Joan Davis and song-and-joke man Jack Haley playing Scandals stars and lovebirds separated by...

<p>When a temperamental star walks out of a big Broadway show, it's time to Give a Girl a Break. But which of the hopefuls will land the lead? Suzy (Debbie Reynolds) brings pizzazz. Joanna (Helen Wood) offers swellegant sophistication. And lovely Madelyn (Marge Champion)...

<p>Legendary movie stars Marion Davies and Bing Crosby create true movie magic in this magnificent musical treat. Bored schoolteacher Sylvia Bruce (Davies) is disenchanted with life until she hears the incredible crooning of egomaniacal radio personality Bill Williams (Crosby). Hopelessly lovestruck, Sylvia has no...

<p>With boundless enthusiasm and enough jive to meld '20s flapper giddiness with '40s swing, 1947's Good News -- the feature directing debut of Charles Walters (Easter Parade, The Unsinkable Molly Brown) and screenwriting debut of Betty Comden and Adolph Green (Singin' in the Rain,...

<p>They came, they played, they conquered. There was no stopping them. The British invasion of the U.S. pop scene was in full force in 1965. And one of the most super of the supergroups was The Dave Clark Five. The quintet takes to the...

<p>Need a vacation? Then head south of the border for a Holiday in Mexico and say hola! to love, comedy, brilliant color and glorious music. This tale of an ambassador's teenage daughter smitten with a world-renowned and much older musician features couples young (Jane...

<p>The screen's great Schnarzan (Jimmy Durante) wants to wow the visiting Baron Munchausen (Jack Pearl, reprising his familiar vaudeville and radio character) by throwing him a big, bustling Tinseltown bash. Hollywood Party -- 8 directors and 8 writers (2 credited) strong -- is the...

<p>With a lilting "Tira Lira La," a bevy of Budapest beauties show up for the birthday celebration of the town's most eligible bachelor, Count Palaffi (Nelson Eddy). Weary of their scheming attentions, the wealthy playboy slips away to his room and dreams the fanciful...

<p>Everyone who's anyone in Brookford can claim ancestors who were heroes of the Revolutionary War. Everyone that is, except ex-entertainers Sam and Susie Parker. But then the Parkers find a letter from George Washington that acknowledges the heroism of a long-ago Parker patriarch and...

<p>Academy Award winner* Gene Kelly brings his remarkable talents as star, director and choreographer to this glittering gala of music, dance and pantomime -- and the result is a lush, one-of-a-kind musical flight of fancy. The film has three episodes, each with its own...

<p>Deanna Durbin lifts her voice in laughter and song in this lighthearted musical comedy costarring Kay Francis and Walter Pidgeon. When Broadway star Georgia Drake (Francis) heads for Honolulu to prepare for her latest show, her daughter Pam (Durbin) wins the lead in the...

<p>The Duncan Sisters (Rosetta and Vivian) hit the ground running in their only Talkie Era feature, dodging through city streets (they're late for work) while a steadily growing mob pursues them. Alas, It's a Great Life did not get the Duncans' film career off...

<p>Academy Award-winner Gene Kelly ("Singin' in the Rain," "An American in Paris"), Oscar-nominee Dan Dailey ("The Pride of St. Louis"), and 5-time Tony-winner dancer/choreographer Michael Kidd ("Seven Brides for Seven Brothers," "Hello Dolly!") star as three WWII comrades who meet again during a ten-year...

<p>Already stars in their own rights when Hollywood paired up Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy for the first time in 1935's Naughty Marietta, it was an alchemical equation that made for true movie magic. In this first volume of a two-volume celebration of the...

<p>For one generation, he needs no introduction. For the next, he's the greatest Pop star they've never heard of. Regardless of where you fall, let's all make time to get reacquainted with the master of mirth and music, Kay Kyser. Bandleader Kyser rose to...

<p>Young Pinkie Wingate (Judy Garland) and her pal Buzz (Freddie Bartholomew) will do anything to stop Pinkie's widowed mother (Mary Astor) from entering into a loveless marriage with the town's fuddy-duddy banker (Gene Lockhart) -- including kidnapping! They stow mom in a travel trailer...

<p>Which rarely screened comedy has what Gene Kelly calls some of his favorite dance creations? That's right: Living in a Big Way. This 1947 movie is Kelly in a big way. Like many postwar films, Living in a Big Way embraces a familiar theme:...

<p>In 1960, a bright young cast made college musicals hip again with the surf-sand-and-sexcapade Where the Boys Are. Two graduates of that smash hit -- Connie Francis and Jim Hutton -- reunite for this kooky comedy about a girl who can't decide if she...

<p>Clerk Jack Kelly goes for the green -- and the girl -- when his golf-crazy boss discovers he's the municipal links champ. Faster than a caddy can pull a six-iron from the bag, Jack is installed at the boss's country club, courting an heiress...

<p>This season in Paris, Red is all the rage! Red Skelton headlines a joyful Technicolor remake of Roberta as a New York producer who inherits a failing Parisian fashion house. His partners are Howard Keel and Gower Champion and the lovelies they look at...

<p>The star of a third-rate theatrical troupe in Miami catches the attention of a Broadway songwriter.</p>

<p>Center stage, singing his heart out -- that's how fans love Al Jolson. And that's what they get in Mammy. It's an ideal showcase for the master showman, giving full rein to Jolson's unique talents in a melodramatic story of a lovelorn minstrel man...

<p>Julie Hampton (Lucille Ball) can tote a lunch pail and carry a tune. She's a Broadway star who's joined the Rosie the Riveters at Morgan Shipyards. Working with her is aspiring playwright "Swanee" Swanson, who insists Julie toil among the yard workers before she...

<p>Archaeologist Andrew Larabee tunnels below an English meadow, seeking a rare historical relic. His shoveling takes him back to the surface and into the lions' cage during a circus act. Just like that, a star -- or at least a Joey -- is born....

<p>Mrs. Brown has a long snout, skinny legs and an owner! That's right, Mrs. Brown is a dog, a greyhound to be precise, and Herman (Peter Noone) and the other Manchester boys are eager to make money racing her. But first there's a matter...

<p>Fresh from Gone with the Wind, Olivia de Havilland was eager to continue in demanding roles. Those roles (and Academy Awards *) would come. But after GWTW's Melanie came a spun-sugar romp starring de Havilland as talented violin-student Amelia. The doting CEO of Monarch...

<p>With their splendid voices, matinee-idol looks, vivacity (she) and stoutheartedness (he), Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy were America's Singing Sweethearts, "a true team, mixing the chemistry that permits one to accept disguised princesses, dream melodies and beautiful doom" (Ethan Mordden, The Hollywood Musical). Naughty...

<p>Oscar -winner* Johnny Mercer gets into the swing of things as he co-writes the songs and makes his only screen appearances in this snappy double feature of RKO musicals. In Old Man Rhythm, a businessman (George Barbier) hears his son (Charles Buddy Rogers) is...

<p>The Jazz Singer made Talkies the rage, backstage musicals became one of the staples of the era and amid all the voh-de-oh-doing and tap-tapping came this movie that Time called "the most interesting of its type to date." Adding to the interest: a narrative...

<p>Jack Haley (the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz) stars in this smorgasbord of entertainment, highlighted by hilarious vignettes from those masters of slapstick, Laurel and Hardy. Bumbling Joe Jenkins (Haley) sells his garage and moves to Hollywood, attempting to land an audition...

<p>The prairie meets Paree when a Texas rancher (Wendell Corey) brings his daughter Liz (Jane Powell) to the City of Light. There's a lot for a Lone Star gal to experience: romance with a handsome young Frenchman (film-debuting Vic Damone). Chic fashion (songbird Liz...

It's fiesta time in Vista Del Rio, and that means much musical celebration. It's also a time of global war. So, in the updated plot of this exuberant World War II-era remake of the 1929 Wheeler and Woolsey romp, that means little Vista Del...

<p>In these three anthology films, RKO Pictures plumbed their library of musical and comedy shorts to cull together a series of celluloid variety shows that are toe-tapping and rib-tickling. Comedian Gil Lamb hosts Make Mine Laughs and delivers up musical and comedic delights from...

<p>Nelson Eddy's rich baritone, Eleanor Powell's astonishing footwork and songs by Cole Porter -- what more could a musical fan wish for? Wrapped in a deliciously preposterous story concerning a Balkan princess, a West Point football hero, a daring solo flight across the Atlantic,...