The best Roscoe Karns’s music movies
If you love cinema, you will share this ranking of the best Roscoe Karns’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 Roscoe Karns.
The Jazz Singer
6.4/10
A young Jewish man is torn between tradition and individuality when his old-fashioned family objects to his career as a jazz singer. This is the first full length feature film to use synchronized sound, and is the original film musical.
Stage Door Canteen
6.2/10
A young soldier on a pass in New York City visits the famed Stage Door Canteen, where famous stars of the theater and films appear and host a recreational center for servicemen during the war. The soldier meets a pretty young hostess and they enjoy the many entertainers and a growing romance
His Butler's Sister
7/10
Aspiring singer Ann Carter visits her stepbrother in New York, hoping to make it on Broadway.
That's Right - You're Wrong
6.1/10
J. D. Forbes, head of the almost-bankrupt Four Star Studios in Hollywood contacts band leader Kay Kyser, who puts on a radio and-live theatre program called "The Kollege of Musical Knowledge," to appear in films. When manager Chuck Deems gets the studio offer, he and band members Ginny Simms, Sully Mason, Ish Kabiddle, Harry Babbitt and the others are all fired up at the prospect of going to Hollywood and working in the movies, but band-leader Kay is all against it and says his old grandmother has told him to stay in his own back yard, but he relents. Once there, Stacey Delmore, a Four Star associate producer left in charge of the studio while Forbes is out of town, discovers that the screenplay writers have prepared a script that has Kay Kyser playing a glamorous lover in an exotic European setting.
Riding High
4.9/10
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.
Minstrel Man
4.8/10
Unusually elaborate for a PRC film, Minstrel Man is a lively musical drama built around the talents of veteran vaudevillian Benny Fields. The star is cast as Dixie Boy Johnson, who rises from the ranks of minstrel shows to become a top Broadway attraction. On the opening night of his greatest stage triumph, Dixie Boy's wife dies in childbirth. Profoundly shaken, he walks out of the show, leaving the baby to be raised by his showbiz pals Mae and Lasses White (Gladys George, Roscoe Karns). The kid grows up to be an attractive young woman named Caroline (Judy Clark), who follows in her dad's footsteps by billing herself as-that's right-Dixie Girl Johnson. This leads to a tearful reunion between Caroline and the father she'd long assumed to be dead. If Minstrel Man seems at times to be a dress rehearsal for Columbia's The Jolson Story (1946), it shouldn't surprising: the PRC film was directed by Joseph H. Lewis, who went on to helm Jolson Story's musical highlights.
Safety in Numbers
5.3/10
Before handing over a large inheritance, a guardian hires three chorus girls to educate his charge about the "underside" of big-city life.
Hi, Good Lookin'!
7.2/10
An usher at a radio station studio pretends to be an executive at the station in order to help a pretty girl become a singer.
Thanks for the Memory
6.4/10
Steve Merrick is an out of work writer who stays home and plays house husband while his wife goes to work for her former fiancé and Merrick's publisher who is still carrying a torch for her.
