The best Alexis Smith’s music movies
If you love cinema, you will share this ranking of the best Alexis Smith’s movies, although you may have ordered them differently. In any case, we hope you love it and with a little luck discovering a movie that you still don’t know about Alexis Smith.
Hollywood Canteen
7/10
Two soldiers on leave spend three nights at a club offering free of charge food, dancing, and entertainment for servicemen on their way overseas. Club founders Bette Davis and John Garfield give talks on the history of the place.
Night of 100 Stars
7.1/10
The most glittering, expensive, and exhausting videotaping session in television history took place Friday February 19, 1982 at New York's Radio City Music Hall. The event, for which ticket-buyers payed up to $1,000 a seat (tax-deductible as a contribution to the Actors' Fund) was billed as "The Night of 100 Stars" but, actually, around 230 stars took part. And most of the audience of 5,800 had no idea in advance that they were paying to see a TV taping, complete with long waits for set and costume changes, tape rewinding, and the like. Executive producer Alexander Cohen estimated that the 5,800 Radio City Music Hall seats sold out at prices ranging from $25 to $1,000. The show itself cost about $4 million to produce and was expected to yield around $2 million for the new addition to the Actors Fund retirement home in Englewood, N. J. ABC is reputed to have paid more than $5 million for the television rights.
Night and Day
6.1/10
Swellegant and elegant. Delux and delovely. Cole Porter was the most sophisticated name in 20th-century songwriting. And to play him on screen, Hollywood chose debonair icon Cary Grant. Grant stars for the first time in color in this fanciful biopic. Alexis Smith plays Linda, whose serendipitous meetings with Cole lead to a meeting at the alter. More than 20 Porter songs grace this tail of triumph and tragedy, with Grand lending is amiable voice to "You're the Top", "Night and Day" and more. Monty Wooley, a Yale contemporary of Porter, portrays himself. And Jane Wyman, Mary Martin, Eve Arden and others provide vocals and verve. Lights down. Curtain up. Standards embraced by generations are yours to enjoy in "Night and Day."
The Constant Nymph
6.7/10
The daughter of a musical mentor adores a promising composer, who is quite fond of the adolescent. When her father dies, an uncle arrives with his own grown daughter, who begins a romance with the composer which culminates in marriage but creates an emotional rivalry that affects the three.
Here Comes the Groom
6.3/10
Foreign correspondent Pete Garvey has 5 days to win back his former fiancée, or he'll lose the orphans he adopted.
Rhapsody in Blue
7/10
Fictionalized biography of George Gershwin and his fight to bring serious music to Broadway.
Alice in Movieland
5.8/10
In a U.S. town that could be anywhere, 18-year-old Alice Purdee wins a free trip to Hollywood. With the assistance of a cheerful porter, she takes the night train and dreams about her arrival. Instead of instant success, she meets disappointment after disappointment, and she needs the unexpected encouragement of her grandmother and an aging, former star whom she meets at a talent night. Finally she gets a call to be an extra, and she's so hopeful that the regulars decide to make a fool of her. Is this the end of Alice's dream? Not if the porter has anything to say about it.
The Horn Blows at Midnight
6.6/10
A trumpet player in a radio orchestra falls asleep during a commercial and dreams he's Athanael, an angel deputized to blow the Last Trumpet at exactly midnight on Earth, thus marking the end of the world.
Thank Your Lucky Stars
6.8/10
An Eddie Cantor look-alike organizes an all-star show to help the war effort.
The Best of Broadway
6.6/10
Tom Bosley hosts a tribute to the American musical theater taped before a live audience featuring dozens of stars recreating their original performances. Among the show-stoppers are Chita Rivera's Spanish Rose dance in "Bye, Bye, Bireie," Ray Walston as the Devil in "Damn Yankees," Nell Carter singing the Fats Waller classic "Cash for Trash" from "Ain't Misbehavin," Glynis Johns with "Send in the Clowns" from "A Little Night Music," Barry Bostwick from "Grease," and many more.
