The best Lynne Overman’s comedy movies

A café in Chicago, 1942. On a rainy night, veteran reporter Homer Howard tells an increasing audience the story of Roxie Hart and the crime she was judged for in 1927.

Two Alaskan salmon fisherman find their friendship at risk when one aligns with Russian fish pirates and the other aligns with local vigilantes.

Big Steve Halloway, gambler and proprietor of New York's Horseshoe Cabaret, where his girl, Bangles Carson sings, is in desperate need of money. He arranges for his fellow bookies, especially Sorrowful Jones, to each pay him $1,000 for his racehorse, Dream Prince, to lose. With all bets being placed at the window, Sorrowful encounters a gambler, having lost $500, wanting to place his bet but is unable to come up with $20. Instead, he places his daughter, Marthy Jane (Shirley Temple), as security, or in bookie's terms, a "marker". Having lost his bet, he commits suicide, leaving "little Miss Marker" under the care of Sorrowful Jones. As Steve hides out in Chicago to avoid investigation for his crooked bets, he entrusts Sorrowful to watch over Bangles during his absence, at which time the "gold digger" helps "tight-wod" with his trouble. When Big Steve learns Bangles is involved with Sorrowful, he returns to New York to do something about it.

Afraid of marriage, Simone (Mary Ellis) breaks off her long term engagement with her fiancé Paul de Lille (Tullio Carminati). Paul heads to the top of The Eiffel Tower with thoughts of suicide. In another part of Paris and also afraid of marriage, Mignon (Ida Lupino) breaks it off from her young lover (James Blakely). Despairing, Mignon also climbs to the top of the The Eiffel Tower intending to leap to her death. There she meets Paul and the two compare stories. After discussion, Paul dissuades her from leaping and the two conspire to make their respective partners jealous by pretending to have an affair with each other.

Pop, a security guard at Paramount has told his son that he's the head of the studio. When his son arrives in Hollywood on shore leave with his buddies, Pop enlists the aid of the studio's dizzy switchboard operator in pulling off the charade. Things get more complicated when Pop agrees to put together a show for the Navy starring Paramount's top contract players.

Man marries opera singer, winds up taking back seat to her career.

A young songwriter leaves his Kentucky home to try to make it in New Orleans. Eventually he winds up in New York, where he sells his songs to a music publisher, but refuses to sell his most treasured composition: "Dixie." The film is based on the life of Daniel Decatur Emmett, who wrote the classic song "Dixie."

Tycoon J.L. Higgins controls his whole family, but one of his sons- in-law, Dan Brooks and his daughter Alice are fed up with that. Brooks quits his job as manager of J.L.'s paper box factory and devotes his life to his racing horse Broadway Bill, but his bank- roll is thin and the luck is against him, he is arrested because of $150 he owes somebody for horse food, but suddenly a planed fraud by somebody else seems to offer him a chance...

Helen and Ken are a pretty strange couple. She is a pathological liar, and he is a scrupulously honest, and therefore unsuccessful lawyer. Helen starts a new job, and when her employer is found dead, all the circumstantial evidence points at her. She is put on trial for murder, and her husband defends her. He thinks she is lying again when she says she didn't do it, and insists she plead that she did, but in self defense. Charlie, a shady, odd character who may or may not know something about what really happened, hangs around the courtroom and jail making rude comments and noises. After Helen is acquitted, he tries to blackmail them.

The Bellows family causes comic confusion on an ocean liner, with time out for radio-style musical acts.

A cabaret dancer witnesses a murder and is forced to hide from gangsters by disguising herself as a male Princeton student.

A songwriter has to come up with a full-length theatrical piece within a few days.

Carny con artist and snake-oil salesman Eustace McGargle tries to stay one step ahead of the sheriff but is completely devoted to his beloved daughter Poppy.

Victor Ballard, a happy-go-lucky albeit impoverished sidewalk photographer, shares a New York City studio apartment with Polish immigrant painter Stefan Janowski. The big city doles out joy and misery indiscriminately: In the apartment below Victor and Steve, Gus Nelson learns that his wife has given birth to quintuplets, while the lonely tenant in the apartment below Gus has given up on life and committed suicide.

Parkhouse plays a practical joke on a poker-playing buddy by sending him home with a lady's chemise stuffed in his coat pocket. The gag backfires, whereupon Parkhouse finds himself in hot water with his own wife. Threatened with divorce, Parkhouse is advised by a zany astrologer to frame Mrs. P. in a compromising situation at the Hotel Haywire, enlisting amateur detectives Bert and Genevieve Sterns in his scheme.

Don Bolton is a movie star who can't stand loud noises. To evade the draft, he decides to get married...but falls for a colonel's daughter. By mistake, he and his two cronies enlist. In basic training, Don hopes to make a good impression on the fair Antoinette and her father, but his military career is largely slapstick. Will he ever get his corporal's stripes?

After being released from prison, con man Thurston Hall gathers his gang of cronies--along with innocent chump Guy Kibbee--to help him sell worthless stock in a New Mexico gold mine.