This RKO showbiz comedy is not widely remembered today but it has a fascinating pedigree and anticipates the plot of Mel Brooks' The Producers (1968) by nearly thirty years. Based on an original story by Howard J. Green (Morning Glory) and produced by former Broadway press representative Howard Benedict, Curtain Call stars Alan Mowbray and Donald MacBride as hapless theatrical producers who conspire to hold back their temperamental leading lady (Helen Vinson) from professional advancement by sabotaging her career with a guaranteed bomb - a stinker of a drama by a first-time playwright (Barbara Read) titled "The End of Everything." Complications arise when their star player professes to love the play and MacBride must woo the headstrong young writer to keep her from learning what is being done with her work. Curtain Call was the first feature film directed by Frank Woodruff (Lady Scarface) and an early job as well for novelist-turned-screenwriter Dalton Trumbo. Hopping from studio to studio during the Depression as he made his reputation with a run of smartly-written scripts (among them, John Farrow's grim jungle survival tale Five Came Back, co-written with Nathaniel West), Dalton earned his first Academy Award nomination for his adaptation of RKO's Kitty Foyle (1940) but is best remembered for the films he wrote after being blacklisted by the House on Un-American Activities Committee: Roman Holiday (1953), The Brave One (1956), Spartacus (1960), and Lonely Are the Brave (1962).

By Richard Harland Smith