I watched Mr. Dodd Takes The Air last night, and I had this unsettled feeling that I was watching an enjoyable, if not-entirely-memorable Warner Bros. film from the mid-to-late 1930s — but from a parallel universe!
A small town electrician becomes a hit singer in New York and gets involved with a gold digger, a thief, an opera singer and the woman he loves (played by Jane Wyman, who I didn't recognize). But where we might have had, say, Dick Powell, Joan Blondell and Guy Kibbee, instead we have Kenny Baker, Gertrude Michael, and Ferris Taylor, playing not just those same roles, but those same characters, just as they might have been performed by their better-known counterparts.
Granted, Dick Powell probably couldn't have pulled off the naive, small-town character (had he started wearing that dopey mustache by 1937?), but I got through most of the film before I discovered that wasn't Guy Kibbee, after all (and I had to watch it again to be certain).
At least we have reliable Frank McHugh as the constant, bridging all possible worlds.
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