The best Rex Lease’s music movies

In the gay '90s, cardsharps take over a Mississippi riverboat from a kindly captain. Their first act is to change the showboat into a floating gambling house. A ham actor and his bumbling sidekick try to devise a way to help the captain regain ownership of the vessel.

Circumstances arise that result in a man impersonating his uncle. As the "uncle", he finds himself pursued by his girlfriend's aunt, who does not approve of their relationship.

To fight a poisonous weed, ranchers are burning their land. Gene is the Inspector brought in and he recommends spraying. The spraying goes well until the Larabee ranch is reached. When Larrabee refuses to allow the equipment on his land, Gene has it sprayed by airplane. Cattle must stay off recently sprayed land and when a Larrabee man shoots down the plane, the crash sends the cattle stampeding toward the newly sprayed land.

Broadway producer Earl Carroll was a Ziegfeld-like entrepreneur who staged lavish revues featuring attractive young ladies. Carroll's annual "Vanities" provided story material for three Hollywood films: Murder at the Vanities (34), A Night at Earl Carroll's (40) and Earl Carroll Vanities (45). This last film was produced by Republic Pictures, a bread-and-butter studio specializing in Westerns and serials; Republic had made musicals before, but few of them were expensive enough to allow for lavish production numbers. Earl Carroll Vanities is likewise rather threadbare, though some of the individual musical highlights aren't bad. The plot, such as it is, concerns financially strapped nightclub owner Eve Arden, who finagles Earl Carroll into staging one of his revues at her club.

Radio's miracle show is on the screen.

When Jesse learns that Krager is cheating settlers, he and his gang rob trains to obtain money for them to purchase their land. Krager, finding a Jesse look alike in Burns, hires him to wreck havoc on the ranchers. When Jesse kills Burns he switches clothes and goes after the culprits.

The first of two films pairing western/serial/action-film leading man Rex Lease (who also sings and dances here) and dialect comedian and comic writer Benny Rubin.

A young girl goes to New York to find a band leader who has stolen all the songs she wrote and is passing them off as his own.