Sunny (1941)/Swing Hostess (1944)/Dixiana (1930)

  This movie started off really slowly.  Like glaciers carving landscapes slowly.

It's about a couple who meet-cute during Mardi Gras.  They start dating and find out that he's rich and she's a circus performer.  I don't know many dudes today who wouldn't jump in the air, clicking their heels and shouting "Yippee!" at finding a girl who even might be a contortionist.  But this is 1941.  Circus people were basically treated like hobos and when his uptight rich family finds out they try everything they can to break up the relationship.

That's when the movie starts to get entertaining.  Ray Bolger (the Scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz) plays the ringmaster in all his tap-dancing glory.  The circus is really more like a traveling vaudeville act with a lot of musical numbers and no elephants.  There's a trained seal but it's really not the same.

Anyway, Rich Guy and Sunny break up right before the wedding and he realizes he's an asshole and sets about getting her back...by buying out a performance of the circus.  It's so much easier to be charming when money is no object.  Sunny doesn't buy it, though, and actually feels humiliated that she was playing to an empty house.  So then Rich Guy resorts to hitching her trailer to his car and driving her to the riverboat where they had a date.

Because nothing says "I love you" like felony kidnapping.

Of course it works, because this is Hollywood and it's not a happy ending if the heroine calls the FBI.  Although I would totally watch that movie.
  Sometimes when I watch old movies, I feel a little like an anthropologist discovering some new facet of an ancient civilization.  For instance, did you know there used to be a job called Jukebox Switchboard Operator?  Yeah.  Apparently, if you wanted to hear a song played on the jukebox, you picked up the attached telephone and talked to a switchboard girl who would put the record on for you.  Like calling into a radio station.

I didn't even know that was a thing!

The movie itself is an overly complicated mistaken identity plot.  Like a cut-rate version of Singin' In the Rain.  It's not particularly good or memorable in any way, except for the Jukebox Operator thing.

  This poster is way more badass than the actual movie.  It's very Tarzan, no?  The actual movie is really tame.  It involves a circus performer who meets a rich plantation owner's son in New Orleans (seriously, was that a common thing in the 30's and 40's?).  This time it's complicated by a nefarious gambler who is scheming to take control of the plantation.  I gotta say, given the choice, Ralf Harolde the gambler is way hotter than Everett Marshall the goody-two-shoes plantation owner.  But then, I like 'em tall, dark, and evil. 

In other news, the Academy Awards nominations come out tomorrow.  SQUEE!  Stay tuned for a repeat performance from last year, where I try and watch as many nominees as I can get my grubby little paws on.