Eddie Cantor Movies

Where the original Gremlins was a horror film spiked with comedy, Gremlins 2: The New Batch is essentially a black comedy, with a couple of horrifying touches. As the film starts, the fantastical trinket shop in Chinatown, which sold the Mogwai in the first film, is demolished by a crazed multi-media businessman called Daniel Clamp (John Glover). The heroes from the first movie, Billy (Zach Galligan) and Kate (Phoebe Cates), happen to work for Clamp in his huge high-rise. They find the Mogwai within Clamp's building, but not before he has accidentally spawned legions of mischievous, lizard-like Gremlins. Soon, the Gremlins are wreaking havoc throughout the building. In the original film, their misdeeds were violent, but here they're also goofy and satirical. Director Joe Dante has filled the film with quick verbal and visual jokes, which, for many, makes Gremlins 2: The New Batch a satire and inversion of the typical horror film. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine, Rovi

Entertainment history. Uses film clips and contemporary interviews to show what Hollywood did during World War II in raising money for the war and entertaining the troops. Shows entertainer Bob Hope and his performing troupe today. Other entertainers include Bing Crosby, Dorothy Lamour, The Andrews Sisters, Jack Benny, Lena Horne, Dinah Shore, Lucille Ball, Jimmy Durante, Red Skelton and Eddie Cantor. ~ Rovi

Eddie Cantor does a sketch alone, then teams up with Brian Donlevy in another before Eddie Fisher and Frank Sinatra make several musical contributions. ~ John Bush, Rovi

The presence of William Powell as legendary showman Flo Ziegfeld at the beginning of Ziegfeld Follies might lead an impressionable viewer from thinking that this 1946 film is a Technicolor sequel to the 1936 Oscar-winning The Great Ziegfeld. Not so: this is more in the line of an all-star revue, much like such early talkies as Hollywood Revue of 1929 and Paramount on Parade. We meet a grayed, immaculately garbed Ziegfeld in Paradise (his daily diary entry reads "Another heavenly day"), where he looks down upon the world and muses over the sort of show he'd be putting on were he still alive. Evidently Ziegfeld's shade has something of a celestial conduit to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios, since his "dream" show is populated almost exclusively by MGM stars. Vincente Minnelli is given sole directorial credit at the beginning of the film, though many of the individual "acts" were helmed by other hands. The Bunin puppets offer a tableau depicting anxious theatregoers piling into a Broadway theatre, as well as caricatures of Ziegfeld's greatest stars. The opening number, "Meet the Ladies", spotlights a whip-wielding (!) Lucille Ball, a bevy of chorus girls dressed as panthers, and, briefly, Margaret O'Brien. Kathryn Grayson and "The Ziegfeld Girls" perform "There's Beauty Everywhere." Victor Moore and Edward Arnold show up in an impressionistically staged adaptation of the comedy chestnut "Pay the Two Dollars". Fred Astaire and Lucille Bremer (a teaming which evidently held high hopes for MGM) dance to the tune of "This Heart is Mine." "Number Please" features Keenan Wynn in an appallingly unfunny rendition of an old comedy sketch (performed far better as "Alexander 2222" in Abbott and Costello's Who Done It?) Lena Horne, strategically placed in the film at a juncture that could be edited out in certain racist communities, sings "Love". Red Skelton stars in the film's comedy highlight, "When Television Comes"-which is actually Skelton's classic "Guzzler's Gin" routine (this sequence was filmed late in 1944, just before Red's entry into the armed services). Astaire and Bremer return for a lively rendition of "Limehouse Blues". Judy Garland, lampooning every Hollywood glamour queen known to man, stops the show with "The Interview". Even better is the the historical one-time-only teaming of Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly in "The Babbitt and the Bromide". The excellence of these sequence compensate for the mediocrity of "The Sweepstakes Ticket", wherein Fanny Brice screams her way through a dull comedy sketch with Hume Cronyn (originally removed from the US prints of Ziegfeld Follies, this sequence was restored for television). Excised from the final release print (pared down to 110 minutes, from a monumental 273 minutes!) was Judy Garland's rendition of "Liza", a duet featuring Garland and Mickey Rooney, and a "Baby Snooks" sketch featuring Fanny Brice, Hanley Stafford and B. S. Pully. A troubled and attenuated production, Ziegfeld Follies proved worth the effort when the film rang up a $2 million profit. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

After a year's absence, entertainer Eddie Cantor returned to the screen in the self-produced Show Business. The plot is loosely based on Cantor's own rise to fame, from vaudeville to Broadway. Covering the years 1914 to 1929, the film reflects the changing tastes in entertainment, though Cantor (as in real life) steadfastly remains the same. Co-stars George Murphy and Joan Davis likewise borrow from their own showbiz experience in playing their characters, while Constance Moore, who was still in her playpen when Cantor was at the height of his Ziegfeld Follies fame, provides the standard love interest. Highlights include such Cantor standards as "Curse of an Aching Heart," "Whoopee," and "Dinah," the latter performed in blackface. The best ensemble number is a devastating satire of Grand Opera, with Joan Davis particularly amusing as a Wagnerian soprano. A few excerpts from Show Business were reused as "flashbacks" in the subsequent Cantor-Davis starrer If You Knew Susie (1948). ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

In this drama, a former big-man-on-campus, finds himself almost destitute twenty years later because he cannot find a job. This does not prevent him from helping out a depressed single mother who is about to commit suicide. He saves her and helps her find a job as a waitress. She thanks him by leaving town and abandoning her son. The poor man is now stuck with raising the baby. He manages to find himself a job as a professor in a girls' school. There he is tormented by his fun-loving female students. When the mischievous girls learn that their professor has a young baby, they rally to his aide. They also help him conceal the babe from the school administration because they would be scandalized and fire him. Eventually the boy's mother is located. ~ Sandra Brennan, Rovi

Musical comedy star Eddie Cantor stars in this story, well suited to his talents, as Eddie Pink, a meek gentleman who works as a tailor and has a terrible crush on Joyce (Ethel Merman), a nightclub singer. Eddie buys a book (through the mail, of course) called Man or Mouse: What Are You?. Taking its advice, he tries to become more confident and assertive, and his new, outgoing personality helps him get a job running an amusement park called Dreamland. But when racketeers move in for a piece of the action on the park's slot machines, he wonders if he's gotten himself in deeper waters than he can safely navigate. Cantor sings four songs in Strike Me Pink, three of them with co-star Merman. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi

Easily the best of Eddie Cantor's gargantuan musical comedies for producer Sam Goldwyn, Roman Scandals begins in the middle-America community of West Rome, where our hero Eddie (Cantor) is employed as a delivery boy. A self-styled authority of Ancient Roman history, Cantor bemoans the fact that the local shanty community is about to be wiped out by scheming politicians, certain that such an outrage could never have happened during Rome's Golden Days. After a blow on the head, Cantor wakes up in Imperial Rome, where he is sold on the slave auction block to good-natured tribune Josephus (David Manners). Cantor soon discovers that the evil emperor Valerius (Edward Arnold) is every bit a crook and grafter as the politicians in West Rome, and he intends to do something about it. He gets a job as food taster for Valerius -- a none-too-secure position, inasmuch as the emperor's wife Agrippa (Veree Teasdale) is constantly trying to poison her husband -- and does his best to smooth the path of romance for Josephus and recently captured princess Sylvia (Gloria Stuart). Cantor's well-intentioned interference earns him a session in the torture chamber, but he escapes and commandeers a chariot, setting the stage for a spectacular slapstick climax. On the verge of recapture, Cantor wakes to find himself in West Rome U.S.A. again, where he quickly foils the modern-day despots and brings about a happy ending for all his friends.

Co-written by George S. Kaufman, Robert E. Sherwood, George Oppenheimer and Arthur Sheekman (the soon-to-be husband of leading lady Gloria Stuart), Roman Scandals manages to get off a few clever satirical licks, but essentially it's a "lappy" lowbrow vehicle for Eddie Cantor, and in this it succeeds immensely. The Busby Berkeley-staged musical numbers, written by Harry Warren, Al Dubin and L. Wolfe Gilbert, must be seen to be believed: In "No More Love", Ruth Etting, playing the Emperor's cast-off mistress Olga, sings a plaintive torch song as dozens of enslaved Goldwyn Girls (including Lucille Ball and Barbara Pepper), wearing nothing but long, blonde wigs, are chained to a rotating pedestal; and in "Keep Young and Beautiful", these same maidens gleefully cavort around a Roman bathhouse in the near-altogether while Cantor, in blackface, hops about, rolls his eyes and claps his hands -- just before a jet of steam "shrinks" him, at which point he metamorphoses into midget Billy Barty! The quintessence of Depression-era escapism, Roman Scandals is must-see entertainment. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Mr. Lemon of Orange was advertised as comedian El Brendel's first starring feature, even though he'd previously dominated the proceedings in the lavish musical fantasy Just Imagine. This time, Brendel plays a dual role: in addition to his Dutch-dialect characterization as a dimwitted immigrant named Oscar, he also plays a tough, accent-less American gangster named Slippy McGee. On the lam from the law, Slippy decides to disguise himself as a simple-minded Swede, which results in poor Oscar, despite his German accent, being mistaken for the gangster. Most of the ethnic humor is quite offensive by today's standard (to be Swedish is to be stupid in this picture), but Brendel's essential likability saves the day. Some of the dialogue in Mr. Lemon of Orange was written by Eddie Cantor, who was decidedly not Scandinavian. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi