The Nitwits

If Betty Grable looks like she’s 18 it’s because she was, in one of her earliest credited features, as Mary, secretary to the boss upstairs at the music publishing company, who needs a murder song, so she can’t wait to tell her songwriting beau Johnnie (Bert Wheeler) down at the cigar shop, launching into a Jimmy McHugh-Dorothy Fields original, in the Wheeler & Woolsey comedy The Nitwits, 1935.

George Stevens with a clever opening, directing his third feature and his second Wheeler & Woolsey vehicle, with a song introduced by Joey Ray, Joan Andrews also singing, the tune by Felix Bernard and L. Wolfe Gilbert, Donald Kerr the lackey, Hale Hamilton the music company boss, and the stars, Bert and Robert, running the cigar shop (Betty Grable in the photo!), in The Nitwits, 1935.

Having by chance written a song about the “Black Widow,” not knowing that music publishing company boss Lake (Hale Hamilton), to whom they’re pitching the song, is being tormented by a blackmailer by that very name, Bert hesitates but Robert manages to perform, in the Wheeler & Woolsey vehicle The Nitwits, 1935.