Scanialara You won't be disappointed!

Dirtylogy It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

Juana what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Kinley This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

weezeralfalfa A Warner musicomedy directed by Busby Berkeley. Unlike the usual Warner film choreographed by Busby, there's no stage dancing or military maneuvers. Instead, it's lots of singing, the majority concentrated at the end, as is typical of Busby's choreography when there is considerable stage dancing and military maneuvering. Unfortunately, only a little of the terminal music was of interest to me. Most of the best musical numbers occurred before this: "Hooray for Hollywood" at the beginning and again at the end, "Silhouette in the Moonlight", also sung twice and, my favorite: "I'm Like a Fish Out of Water". We have a variety of featured singers, such as Dick Powell, Rosemary Lane, Johnnie Davis, Francis Langford, and Terry Cooper. New songs were composed by the team of Richard Whiting and Johnny Mercer. Music by Benny Goodman or Raymond Paige Orchestras or the multiracial Benny Goodman quartet(Benny, Teddy Wilson, Gene Kruppa, and Lionel Hampton).The screen play is decent, with a variety of character actors, as well as Dick Powell , contributing to the humor. The plot is mainly concerned with the impersonation of spoiled Hollywood diva Mona(Lola Lane) by a look-alike waitress in the hotel: Virginia(Rosemary Lane). Seems Mona had a temper tantrum about a casting decision, and refused to go to the premier showing of her latest picture. To avoid embarrassment, her producer ordered that a look-alike be found to take her place, squired by new recruit Ronnie(Dick Powell). This proved fortuitous, as Virginia and Ronnie, both singers, soon fell in love. There is no love-hate oscillations in this relationship, as in many musicals. However, Ronnie is confused for a while when he greets Virginia, a waitress, presumably as as Mona, then the real Mona, leading a retinue of dogs and dog walkers, shows up in the hotel. Ronnie gets slapped twice for acting fresh with the real Mona, before he finally learns the truth, and decides he likes Virginia, the waitress, much better. Ronnie is soon involved with another impersonation, when he is asked to dub the singing of Mona's costar for her new movie. This he does, but when the studio wants him to dub the costar's voice at a radio show, he balks. His friends arrange to take the costar elsewhere during the broadcast, so that Ronnie can show his face as the real singer. Hugh Herbert who played Mona's goofy father, and Mabel Todd, as Mona's goofy sister, tried to be funny in their usual ways, but usually fell flat for me.Currently available as part of the Busby Berkeley DVD Collection

tavm With Black History Month starting tomorrow, I feel a need to point out that this vintage movie of the '30s has a couple of interesting contrasts concerning race relations at the time. When Hugh Hubert does a blackface scene in a filming segment taking place in the 19th century South, this was something that was considered humorously accepted by much of the American public though it would cause an uproar today. But the rare sight of African-American musicians Teddy Wilson and Lionel Hampton performing alongside Caucasions Gene Krupa and Benny Goodman on film (this was supposedly the first instance of this happening) is something that would be taken for granted today. For me personally, I tolerated the former and very much loved the latter especially the xylophone sequence. The story, about the Dick Powell character trying to get a break in movies, is quite satirical and very funny with many exaggerations of the way things were then. My main interest in seeing this was because of Ted Healy who once was the boss of who are now known as The Three Stooges. He can be overbearing but I laughed just the same. Also of interest, the future President of the United States-Ronald Reagan-as an announcer which was his initial foray in show business. Plenty of wonderful songs abound like the classic "Hooray for Hollywood" though I was surprised to hear the name "Donald Duck" retained in the lyrics as this was a Warner Bros. picture and Donald's a Disney character! So on that note, I highly recommend Hollywood Hotel.

nomoons11 For my viewing taste...this is far better acting and story wise than Gold Diggers of 1935.A vocalist in Glen Miller's band gets a call to go to Hollywood. When he arrives, we get to see what actors get to go through to break into the business. When the vocalist arrives, within hours, he gets a call to be a big stars date at her world premiere. Problem is...she's a stand-n and he doesn't know it. After this we get a lot of shenanigans and really funny stuff throughout.You won't get any depth with any Busby Berkeley film but you will get style. Unfortunately there's very little musical or dance value in this one but that doesn't mean it hurts what it is. There are 2 numbers and the biggest is in the middle where the all the singing waiters and customers at a car hope have some fun. Not a lot of the Busby Berkeley extravaganza you're use to but thats not bad. You have to remember, by this time, Busby Berkeley and his style of films were on their way out and he was adapting so we get no masterpiece of choreographed dance and singing. We get a film with good actors and a pretty good script/idea.Flat out though, watch Bombshell with Jean Harlow, and notice the similarities. The spoiled brat star and her do nothing father and dumb/worthless sibling. Not far into this I was grinning. They tried "slightly" to take from a fine film like Bombshell but with some singing. It actually works quite well.Watch this to see Busby Berkeley segway into real mainstream non-musical stuff. I really enjoyed it. Lots of stars and painfully funny situations made me itch to write a review.

DLewis A sprawling, huge, hot mess of a musical from Busby Berkeley and the last of his cycle of features for Warners; not to mention the only one that doesn't contain any dedicated dance routines. Dick Powell is the center of attention, playing a small town saxophonist with the Benny Goodman Orchestra (?) who heads off to Hollywood to work a short stint at a movie studio he has won in a contest, only to take the fall for a stunt involving a stand in for a major star who discovers the ruse and has them both fired. He does fall for the girl, and he doesn't lose her this time, but simply makes himself scarce at points. Along the way we hear some fine, and not so fine, Johnny Mercer and Richard Whiting penned production numbers, and Benny Goodman does make it back into the picture somehow, though that is not explained, and he and his fabulous 1937 orchestra and quartet provide the film with its finest moments. And just in time, as by February of 1938 the orchestra as it is here was basically disbanded.One wants to draw comparisons with "A Star is Born," released by the Selznick studio in April of 1937, and this may have been intended as an upbeat answer to the very downbeat Selznick picture. It opens with a rousing, energy filled sequence with Powell, Goodman, Frances Langford and Johnny "Scat" Davis introducing the song "Hooray for Hollywood" which has since become a theme song for Tinseltown of sorts, even if the movie it came from isn't particularly well remembered. There is a nice and useful montage of the facades of some of the most famous Hollywood restaurants, all demolished now. Then this leads into a very, very long second chapter, setting up the premise, and this part of the film seems to take forever; it is quite some time before we make it to another song. While there are no dance routines, there are large scale co-ordinations of action, particularly in a complex sequence in Callahan's Drive In involving carhops, Powell, Ted Healy, Edgar Kennedy, a studio executive, customers and crashing dishes. It's emblematic of the whole film; Berkeley has all of these balls up in the air -- the Benny Goodman and (over the top) Raymond Paige Orchestra, Powell, duplicitous studio executives, Lola Lane as a snooty, self-absorbed star and real life sister Rosemary Lane playing her double, the antics of Hugh Herbert, a parody of "Uncle Tom's Cabin" (or "Gone with the Wind," or both) as part of a film within a film, a radio show with Louella Parsons (who is not at all comfortable on screen), celebrity radio hosts, songs etc. But these elements don't really shake hands; things happen because they happen. We see Frances Langford, dewy-eyed, singing Dick Powell away to the train station at the start and later she returns to sing on the radio program that Dick Powell makes his way onto, but we don't know why or how she got there. "Hollywood Hotel" throws all manner of things at us to impress us, but ultimately it's Benny Goodman and "Hooray for Hollywood" that stays with you; as a film, and story, nothing seems to stick together very well here.There is some dated, and unfortunate, racial humor of the kind that doesn't travel well with post-modern audiences, but mercifully such scenes are brief. And, in a sense, being able to see Lionel Hampton and Teddy Wilson as the stars and expert musicians they are in Goodman's quartet makes up for that, though this sequence was placed as it is deliberately so that it could be lifted out of the film when it played the South. It seems that with any 1930s film that Warner Bros. sensed was in trouble they'd find a way to drop Hugh Herbert into the mix; a mixed blessing. Here, he is abysmal. I do not object as much to Mabel Todd's character as some of the other commentators here, but I agree that she is not the film's strongest asset. Powell soldiers on through his typically wide-eyed boy character from earlier Berkeley musicals, but here you get the sense he is running out of patience with the role and is playing him as a stock. Both Healy and Alan Mowbray are funny; though this was not Healy's last picture, it was the last to open in his lifetime -- he died the day after its Hollywood premiere. There is an amusing subtext about the vagaries of dubbing pictures, and several nice shots of Hollywood landmarks of the past. One may argue that there is not enough of Glenda Farrell, and at least one musical number was cut from the picture, but more is not necessarily what one wants from this film; even at a minute short of two hours, it feels really long. "Hollywood Hotel" is worth seeing for Goodman, and some of the songs; otherwise, this one must have given Busby Berkeley no end of headaches. With all that's going in "42ND Street," every action and every character links together. It just doesn't happen in "Hollywood Hotel;" the rooms are over-booked.