Thank Your Lucky Stars

Dinah Shore has just opened with the the title song, as radio host Don Wilson helps her segue to top-billed Eddie Cantor and the first big cameo, John Garfield (who co-founded the armed services pro-bono entertainment club the Hollywood Canteen, to which all the stars donated their salaries), with the Harold Arlen-Johnny Mercer tune, in one of the funniest bits in the bulky Warner Bros. wartime propaganda showcase, Thank Your Lucky Stars, 1943.

Bette Davis (like all the Warner Bros. stars, donating her salary to the Hollywood Canteen she co-founded), delivers an original by Arthur Schwartz and Frank Loesser which earned an Academy Award nomination and became a widely recorded hit, in the variety propaganda effort Thank Your Lucky Stars, 1943, Conrad Wiedell her dance partner.

S.Z. “Cuddles” Sakall is the promoter with Edward Everett Horton of a fictional wartime benefit show, and they’re being driven nuts by (pretending) egomaniac star Eddie Cantor, so he doesn’t recognize Humphrey Bogart, maybe because of the impressive scruffy beard, in the Warner Bros. morale-Musical variety hit Thank Your Lucky Stars, 1943.

The schtick for Errol Flynn (who like the other big names, donated his $50,000 salary to the armed services benefit Hollywood Canteen) for the wartime fundraiser show-within-a-show premise of the Warner Bros. propaganda feature is an original by Arthur Schwartz and Frank Loesser, staged by Leroy Prinz, in Thank Your Lucky Stars, 1943.

An Eddie Cantor look-alike organizes an all-star show to help the war effort in Thank Your Lucky Stars (1943) with guest appearances by Bette Davis, Errol Flynn & Humphrey Bogart.