The Big Broadcast of 1938 (1938)

This is a bit different from your usual year-end extravaganza, with far more of a story underpinning the potpourri of acts. It's all centred around a great transatlantic race between the modern-looking SS Gigantic and the more traditional looking champion - the SS Collossal. The owner of the former liner ('T.F.') plans to put his brother ('S.B.') - both played by W.C. Fields, onto the latter to cause a bit of mischief, but instead he and daughter 'Martha' (Martha Raye) end up on the wrong boat! Things could have proved even more disastrous had their entertainments man 'Buzz' (Bob Hope) not been able to free himself from jail: he could not afford to pay the tax man and his three ex-wives from his wages. With the race finally underway, Fields settles into something of a secondary role whilst Hope springs eternal with his own new brand of dead-pan humour as his radio broadcasts serve as an excuse for some lively entertainments, a few songs - including his own with Shirley Ross (one of his ex-wives) delivering 'Thanks for the Memory'. Aside from his plethora of ex's, Hope also has the prospective 4th 'Mrs. Fielding' (Dorothy Lamour) onboard and she gets a couple of numbers as they race across the ocean. The snag with this type of film is that by it's very nature, it sees too many people with too little screen time and although we do see something of what Hope is about to become here, the whole film has the look of a Christmas compendium to it. Fields and Hope are never in shot together, indeed barring a very few scenes Fields is remarkably subdued throughout, and by the conclusion it felt like someone had been assemble editing this thing since April. It's an engaging piece of nostalgia, and for me is quite a striking demonstration of just how far this industry has come in the less than a decade since films were silent. No harm in a dose of Vaudeville tempered with some precursors to the mother-in-law joke, but it's not a film that I reckon needs watching twice.