This effervescent show business comedy with crime film flourishes may remind contemporary audiences of Woody Allen's Bullets Over Broadway (1994). Rubber-faced comedienne Zasu Pitts stars as Annie Snodgrass, a mousey Depression era bank employee with aspirations of making it as a singer. While performing a sentimental ballad to motherly love at a talent show, Annie so moves eavesdropping gangster Fenny Sylvester (Nat Pendleton) that he agrees to sponsor her career, to the extreme of staging a bogus kidnapping to generate publicity for Annie's Broadway debut. Trouble arises when Fenny's moll Ruby (Pert Kelton) becomes jealous of the lug's attentions and contrives to make the fake abduction all too real. Marion Dix and Laird Doyle adapted Aben Kandel's original story, "So You Won't Sing, Eh?" (the film's original title); Kandel's peripatetic career ranged from original story credit to uncredited script doctoring (Magnificent Obsession [1935]) and screenplays for such outré outings as I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957), Horrors of the Black Museum (1959), and Trog (1970). King Kong (1933) creator Merian C. Cooper produced Sing and Like It (1934), which benefits from the photography of RKO cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca. Watch the supporting cast for crusty turns by look-alike character actors Walter Brennan and Phil Tead.

By Richard Harland Smith