Tag: Jack Benny

The Hollywood Revue of 1929

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Holywood Revue of 1929

The Hollywood Revue of 1929. 118 minutes. Directed by Charles Reisner. Featuring performances by the Albertina Rasch Dancers, George K. Arthur, Lionel Barrymore, The Brox Sisters, Joan Crawford, Karl Dane, Marion Davies, Marie Dressler, Cliff “Ukulele Ike” Edwards, Gus Edwards, John Gilbert, William Haines, Oliver Hardy, Buster Keaton, Charles King, Stan Laurel, Gwen Lee, Bessie Love, Polly Moran, Anita Page, and Norma Shearer. With Jack Benny and Conrad Nagel as masters of ceremonies.

The success of The Jazz Singer (1927) was the catalyst for the widespread use of synchronized sound in feature films, and as the studios began to manufacture sound productions en masse, they gravitated towards the format of the plotless musical revue. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s The Hollywood Revue of 1929 is a glitzy entry in the genre that, like its contemporaries King of Jazz (1930) and Elstree Calling (1930), offers plentiful sights and sounds to exhibit the new technology. A modern audience will likely take diminished … Read the rest

Hollywood Canteen (1944)

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Hollywood Canteen (1944)

Hollywood Canteen (1944). 124 minutes. Directed by Delmer Daves. Starring Robert Hutton (as Slim Green) and Dane Clark (as Sergeant Nolan). Also starring as themselves: The Andrews Sisters, Jack Benny, Joe E. Brown, Eddie Cantor, Kitty Carlisle, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Jimmy Dorsey, John Garfield, Sydney Greenstreet, Paul Henreid, Joan Leslie, Peter Lorre, Ida Lupino, Joan McCracken, Roy Rogers and Trigger, S. Z. Sakall, Barbara Stanwyck, and Jane Wyman.

Hollywood Canteen is a World War Two-era propaganda film that takes place in the real Hollywood Canteen, a wartime nightclub for G.I.s that operated from 1942 to 1945 and was staffed by Hollywood superstars. Inside the canteen, the most glamorous names in the film industry performed menial labor by preparing food, waiting tables, and cleaning up after guests, and provided entertainment on a main stage. The movie Hollywood Canteen offers us a glimpse of what a canteen guest’s experience might have been like while also promoting the war effort and the … Read the rest

To Be or Not to Be (1942)

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"To Be or Not To Be" (1942)

To Be or Not to Be (1942). 99 minutes. Directed by Ernst Lubitsch. Starring Carole Lombard (as Maria Tura), Jack Benny (as Joseph Tura), Robert Stack (as Lt. Stanislav Sobinski), Felix Bressart (as Greenberg), Lionel Atwill (as Rawich), Stanley Ridges (as Professor Alexander Siletsky), Sig Ruman (as Col. Erhardt), Tom Dugan (as Bronski), Charles Halton (as Dubosh), and Henry Victor (as Capt. Schultz).

In To Be or Not to Be, Jack Benny plays Joseph Tura, a Polish actor in Nazi-occupied Warsaw who thinks highly of himself even though few others do. At one point, disguised as a Gestapo agent to further the Polish cause, he asks the German Col. Erhardt if he has heard of this actor Joseph Tura, apparently fishing for compliments even while conducting dangerous espionage. Col. Erhardt, to Tura’s surprise, has heard of the actor. “Oh yes,”the Nazi says, “I saw him in Hamlet once. What he did to Shakespeare we are doing now to Poland.”… Read the rest