The best Douglas Leavitt’s movies

An Argentine heiress thinks a penniless American dancer is her secret admirer.

Beverly Ross, the switchboard operator at a local radio station, jumps at the chance to be the DJ for an early morning show before the soldiers at a nearby army camp assemble for reveille. Beverly, with her modern music, camp bulletins and chatter, is a hit with the soldiers. Beverly's younger brother and his two buddies are soldiers at the camp. The buddies vie for Beverly's attentions.

A 4F military school teacher's lie about being accepted for active duty causes problems on the home front.

Radio singer Joan Abbott, known as the "Crunchy-Wunchy Thrush", does not want to renew her contract with the cereal sponsor, as she wants to go to college. But her guardian, her Uncle Willie signs the contract in order to pay off his own debts. But this time Joan won't take no for an answer and enrolls under an assumed name. When Joan goes missing, the radio institutes a search for Joan via a publicity stunt.

Although he's credited only for story, the dialogue has Fuller's headline punch, and of course newspapering was an alternative universe he knew inside out. A publisher whose once-honest New York tabloid has been ideologically hijacked is aiming to make a course correction. Minutes after saying, "The power of the press is the freedom to tell the truth--it is not the freedom to twist the truth," he's a dead man. The rest of the movie deals with the efforts of his old friend, small-town newsman Guy Kibbee, to complete the paper's redemption. Made in mid World War II, the picture angrily and explicitly likens homegrown demagoguery to Nazism--and its condemnation of media organizations "playing on the prejudices of stupid people" has acquired fresh relevance. Otto Kruger and Victor Jory ("a little Himmler") supply the villainy, while Lee Tracy steps up to save the day as a casehardened yellow journalist named Griff.

The Two Senoritas from Chicago are Gloria (Jinx Falkenburg) and Maria (Ann Savage). When their goofy pal Daisy Baker (Joan Davis) passes off a discarded Portuguese play manuscript as her own, producer Rupert Shannon (Emory Parnell) agrees to bankroll the production. With stars in their eyes, Gloria and Maria pretend to be a pair of Portuguese musical comedy stars, thereby winning parts in the new production. The fun begins when the play's original authors sell the same manuscript to a rival producer.

A woman rents a gloomy basement apartment in Greenwich Village thinking it will provide the perfect atmosphere for her mystery writer husband to create his next book. They soon find themselves in the middle of a real-life mystery when a corpse turns up in their apartment.

When the profits of their various film series began slumping in the mid-1940s, Columbia Pictures tried to broaden the appeal of these films by disguing the fact that they were indeed series entries. Thus it was that Columbia's 13th "Blondie" picture was shipped out as It's a Great Life. The comic confusion begins when Dagwood Bumstead (Arthur Lake), intending to buy a house, buys a horse instead. Before the film's 75 minutes have run their course, Dagwood gets mixed up in a fox hunt. But Blondie (Penny Singleton) saves the day as usual, with the help of eccentric millionaire Timothy Brewster (Hugh Herbert). After It's a Great Life and #14 "Footlight Glamour", Columbia restored the name "Blondie" to the titles of all subesequent installments in this long-running comedy series.

Fay Weston (Jinx Falkenburg), a radio singer of no consequence, pretends to be the daughter of a recently deceased Broadway stage star in order to hoodwink Broadway play producer in starring her in a planned-show that is a tribute to her supposed mother.