Thank Your Lucky Stars

A show is being put together to raise money for the war, and its producers want every star of the day on the stage. Into this walks a man who is Eddie Cantor's double, producing two Cantors, a run of mistaken identities and a scramble to save the show. The plot is a pretext anyway; the point is the sequence of numbers and the chance to see the studio's roster doing things nobody expected of them. Warner Bros built the picture as a fundraiser: the stars gave their entire fees to the Hollywood Canteen, which Bette Davis and John Garfield had founded. The moment most remembered is Bette Davis singing They're Either Too Young or Too Old, a song that went on to an Academy Award nomination. Errol Flynn does a music-hall turn and Humphrey Bogart appears in a short scene at his own expense. The two-hour-plus running time drags now, but most of the individual pieces still stand up.