The best Bill Goodwin’s music movies

After breaking up with her fiancé, a gym teacher returns to work at a women's college, but a legal loophole allows him to enroll as one of her students.

Former radio singer Kay learns from her gossipy friends that her husband, Steve, has had an affair with chorus girl Crystal. Devastated, Kay tries to ignore the information, but when Crystal performs one of her musical numbers at a charity benefit, she breaks down and goes to Reno to file for divorce. However, when she hears that gold-digging Crystal is making Steve unhappy, Kay resolves to get her husband back.

In this reworking of "No, No, Nanette," wealthy heiress Nanette Carter bets her uncle $25,000 that she can say "no" to everything for 48 hours. If she wins, she can invest the money in a Broadway show featuring songs written by her beau, and of course, in which she will star. Trouble is, she doesn't realize her uncle's been wiped out by the Stock Market crash.

Director Hal Walker's 1945 musical comedy stars Betty Hutton as a hat-check girl at New York City's famous nightclub. The cast also includes Barry Fitzgerald, Don Defore, Andy Russell, Iria Adrian and Robert Benchley.

Three struggling theatrical performers meet a famous songwriter who is trying to convince a wealthy oilman to finance a musical he is scripting, promising them stardom if it comes to fruition.

Kitschy musical remake of "Bachelor Mother". Debbie Reynolds plays an over-eager clerk in a large department store and Eddie Fisher plays the boss' son. After getting fired from her job, she finds an adorable baby on the steps of the foundling home and the folks inside mistake her for the mother. Fisher, well-meaning, but obtuse, tries to help her out with the baby, and the buds of romance begin to appear. Meanwhile old Merlin, the owner of the store, thinks he just might be a grandfather...

Paramount's highly-fictionalized 1945 musical biography of Texas Guinan, the Roaring '20s New York nightclub owner and celebrity with alleged underworld connections who famously greeted her customers with the phrase, "Hello, suckers!"

No relation to the 1950 Frank Capra film of the same name, the 1943 Technicolor musical Riding High is a by-the-numbers vehicle for Dorothy Lamour and Dick Powell. Lamour stars as Ann Castle, a former burlesque queen who heads westward to claim her father's silver mine. Powell plays mining engineer Steve Baird, who like Ann has a vested interest in the worked-out mine. With the help of genial counterfeiter Mortimer J. Slocum (Victor Moore), Steve and Ann are able to peddle mining stock, thus saving her from bankruptcy. The stockholders are in a lynching mood when it appears that they've been flim-flammed, but a last minute "miracle" saves the day. Featured in the cast are Paramount stalwarts Cass Daley and Gil Lamb, the former doing her quasi-Martha Raye act and the latter swallowing his harmonica for the millionth time. Production values are excellent and the songs are exuberantly performed; it's only in its hackneyed plot that Riding High slows to a clip-clop.

In this sequel to The Jolson Story, we pick up the singer's career just as he has returned to the stage after a premature retirement. But his wife has left him and the appeal of the spotlight isn't what it used to be. This time Jolson trades in the stage for life in the fast lane: women, horses, travel. It takes the death of Moma Yoelson and World War II to bring Jolson back to earth - and to the stage. Once again teamed with manager Steve Martin, Jolson travels the world entertaining troops everywhere from Alaska to Africa. When he finally collapses from exhaustion it takes young, pretty nurse Ellen Clark to show him there's more to life than "just rushing around".