Delightfully Dangerous (1945)

Director:

Arthur Lubin

Writers:

Walter DeLeon (writer)
Arthur Phillips (writer)

Release Date:

31 March 1945 (USA)

Genre:

Musical

Plot:

Young Sherry Williams dreams of having a singing career, and she idolizes her older sister Josephine...

Cast

Jane Powell	...	Sherry Williams
Ralph Bellamy	...	Arthur Hale
Constance Moore	...	Josephine 'Jo' Williams / Bubbles Barton
Morton Gould	...	And his orchestra
Arthur Treacher	...	Jeffers, Hale's Butler
Louise Beavers	...	Hannah, Jo's Maid
Ruth Tobey	...	Molly Bradley, Sherry's Roomate
rest of cast listed alphabetically:
Morton Gould's Orchestra	...	Themselves

Runtime:

USA:92 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Black and White

Aspect Ratio:

1.37 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono (Western Electric Sound System)

Certification:

USA:Approved | Sweden:Btl

Company:

Hunt Stromberg Productions

Soundtrack:

Adirondack Mama

Z musical

In the '30s and '50s the Hollywood musical did mostly Broadway-style material, but during the WW2 period there was a craze for the vaudeville era: "For Me and My Gal", "Lady of Burlesque", "Ziegfeld Girl", and many more. These musicals were always best when they cast real ex-vaudevillians (Judy Garland) or Broadway dancers (Barbara Stanwyck). This one doesn't have either but it's not too bad. As usual with no-budget musicals there isn't a lot of music in it, and though it's got some burlesque sequences of course there are no authentic burlesque (i.e., stripper) numbers. (The censorship period in Hollywood was a bad time to get nostalgic for burlesque.) There is one clever dance number, with the dancers are got up as marionettes at a fair.

Ralph Bellamy is an impresario and Powell is the cute girl who dreams of Carnegie Hall and discovers (it is never a secret to us) that her "theatrical" sister (Moore) is really a burlesque queen. Powell dreams up a way to redeem the sister. Never mind that Powell and Moore look nothing alike and don't appear to like one another. Moore, who made only Z movies, seems to sense that Powell was on to bigger and better things (she was but not for very long). Powell is a bit annoying in the early scenes, but she gets rather funny later once she's swathed in mink and pretending to be a diva. All in all, this is kind of a fun period piece. It's more typical of 1940s musicals than the big classics everyone knows about.