It Goes Round—But Not Merrily!

Radio Record, 8 July 1938, Page 27

It Goes Round—But Not Merrily!

("Manhattan Merry-Go-Round." Republic. Directed by Charles E. Reisner, Starring Phil Regan, Leo Carillo, Already released.)

scenario writer these’. days when a producer calls pon him to dig up a story for a musical film. The poor chap must know -he’s beaten from the start. The best he can expect from the critics (the honest ones) is that they’ll say something like this: "The story is a suitable thread to tie the variety turns together." So I’m not going to be unduly hard on the scenarist responsible for "Man-hattan-Merry-Go Round." His chief characters are a racketeer who buys a gramophone recording company, a girl (Ann Dvorak) who loves a crooner and wants to see him succeed (what strange ambitions some girls do have!), andthe crooner himself, There’s also an actress who pretends to be a temperamental opera. singer-only she’s really not supposed to.be pretending-and who estringes the crooner from the heroine, And so on, and so ou. . Beyond a-.Joke "MANHATTAN Merry-Go-Hound" is not particularly merry, but it certainly goes round. Each revolution is marked by Leo Carillo (another of those gangsters with musical souls) declaiming, "I am a nan of few words, but when I speak I say plenty." The first two or three times he said this, it was almost funny: when he had repeated it for about the twelfth time, it bad gone far beyond being a joke. Into its 88 minutes this film also crams the playing of four jazz bands; all of which sounded very much the same to me, the crooning of Phil Regan and Gene Autry, dancing, vaudeville novelities, a glimpse of a baseball game (Heaven knows why!), and the fast but not noticeably clever talking of James Gleason, J.nis Alberni and Fienry Armetta. | T’S hard not to feel sorry fora