The best Howard Hickman’s music movies
If you love cinema, you will share this ranking of the best Howard Hickman’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 Howard Hickman.
Strike Up the Band
6.8/10
Jimmy and Mary get a group of kids together to play in a school orchestra. A huge contest between schools is coming up and they have a hard time raising money to go to Chicago for the contest.
It All Came True
6.6/10
After crooked nightclub owner Chips Maguire murders a police informant, he blackmails his piano player to allow him to stay at his eccentric mother's boarding house.
Start Cheering
6/10
After retiring from movies to get an education, a man discovers his ex-staff is trying to have him expelled.
Ice-Capades
5.4/10
By Republic Pictures standards, 1941's Ice-Capades certainly qualifies as an "all-star" film. The many subplots center around a performance of the real-life Ice-Capades skating troupe, featuring such luminaries as Belita, Red McCarthy, Megan Taylor, and future Republic film queen Vera Hruba Ralston. James Ellison plays the nominal leading character, a hotshot newsreel cameraman named Bob Clemens. Assigned to film an international skating star in action, Clemens inadvertently wastes miles of celluloid on aspiring skater Marie (Dorothy Lewis) rather than the real star, the unphotogenic Karen Vajda (Rene Riano). But not to worry: With the help of slick showbiz promoter Larry Herman (Phil Silvers), Marie becomes an Ice-Capades headliner in her own right. In addition to Silvers, the comedy relief in Ice-Capades is in the capable hands of Vera Vague (Barbara Jo Allen), Jerry Colonna and Gus Schilling.
One Hundred Men and a Girl
6.7/10
The daughter of a struggling musician forms a symphony orchestra made up of his unemployed friends and through persistence, charm and a few misunderstandings, is able to get Leopold Stokowski to lead them in a concert that leads to a radio contract.
Artists & Models
6/10
An ad man gets his model girlfriend to pose as a debutante for a new campaign.
Three Smart Girls Grow Up
6.9/10
A businessman's (Charles Winninger) youngest daughter (Deanna Durbin) helps her innocent sisters in love.
Spring Parade
6.7/10
In this light and lovely romantic musical, a Hungarian woman attends a Viennese fair and buys a card from a gypsy fortune teller. It says that she will meet someone important and is destined for a happy marriage. Afterward she gets a job as a baker's assistant. She then meets a handsome army drummer who secretly dreams of becoming a famous composer and conductor. Unfortunately the military forbids the young corporal to create his own music. But then Ilonka secretly sends one of the drummer's waltzes to the Austrian Emperor with his weekly order of pastries. Her act paves the way toward the tuneful and joyous fulfillment of the gypsy's prediction.
Gentlemen Are Born
6.3/10
A well-cloistered and protected-against-reality group of college students get their diplomas in the heart of the Great Depression, and quickly learn that the piece of paper the diploma is written on is worth about eighteen-dollars-a-week in the job-market...for the lucky ones. Some of them fare even worse.
Uncle Joe
6.1/10
A pretty Chicago teenager (Gale Storm), who's being courted by an older man, is sent by her worried parents to live with her uncle on his Iowa farm.
My Old Kentucky Home
5.7/10
Larry is engaged to Lisbeth Blair but he becomes attentive to Gail, a singer, and is injured in an accident in her apartment. He is slowly going blind and decides that he shouldn't marry Lisbeth. A surgeon restores his sight and he and Lisbeth reconcile to the strains of "My Old Kentucky Home" sung by the Hall Johnson Choir.
The Broadway Hoofer
Broadway dancing star Adele Dorey who, overworked and exhausted, suddenly ups and leaves New York in favor of a country village. But when promoter Bobby Lewis (Egan) of the barnstorming Gay Girlies Burlesque Company arrives in town, he picks an incognito Adele among all the pretty village girls to star in his new show. On a lark, Adele introduces her maid Jane (Louise Fazenda) as her mother and accepts a contract. When Adele's identity is finally revealed, the slumming star apologizes for her deception by offering Bobby a Broadway job.
