If you've never hear a properly re-mastered recording of Lily Pons, one of the great voices of the 20th century, you owe it to yourself to catch her last starring vehicle for RKO. The studio never really knew what to do with her besides let her do her operatic thing, which she does with Rossini's "Air du Rossignol,"and "Je suit Titania" from Mignon and the Mad Scene from Lucia di Lammermoor. They also saddled her with a nonsensical plot about an aspiring opera singer who decides to launch her career by pretending to be an African "bird girl" so she can be discovered by entrepreneur Edward Everett Horton. Like her other starring vehicles at RKO -- I Dream Too Much (1935) and That Girl from Paris (1936) -- Hitting a New High has all the right parts. Horton, Jack Oakie, as the press agent who masterminds the scheme, and Eric Blore, as another obsequious gentleman's gentleman provide some inspired comic turns between arias. And director Raoul Walsh keeps it all moving at a good pace. But it just didn't come together for movie fans. The film lost money, ending Pons's career as a movie star.

By Frank Miller