Two Señoritas from Chicago (1943) User Reviews

Joan Davis!

[boblipton · 7/10 · 2 March 2024]

Joan Davis is the trash sorter at a swanky Chicago hotel. When two Portuguese playwrights tear up their script and toss it in the chute, Miss Davis finds it. Since she's also Ann Savage's and Jinx Falkenberg's theatrical agent, she ships it to Broadway producer Emory Parnell. He loves it, and he loves Miss Savage and Miss Falkenberg as Portugese. However, the Portuguese have redrafted their script, and sell it to competing producer, who....

Who cares? It's a Black & White wartime musical, which means it will all end well with a big, patriotic production number. Meanwhile, there's Miss Davis to contend with. She breaks the fourth wall, talks to herself, gets hoisted in the air, and similar shenanigans to the general and my approval. Never mind that the Portuguese word is 'senhoritas' or that the ladies' singing is dubbed. With Leslie Brooks, Ramsay Ames, and Charles C. Wilson.

The first (and only musical I know of) about plagiarism.

[mark.waltz · 5/10 · 17 August 2017]

"He's got four headaches", piano player Bob Haymes tells agent Joan Davis, referring to four phonies, struggling chorus girls pretending to be Portuguese celebrities to get jobs in a Broadway show. Davis, a salvage clerk in a Chicago hotel, finds a tossed away play script, and sell it to a Broadway producer with two of the chorus girls (Jinx Falkenberg and Ann Savage) as "stars", whom he assumes are Portuguese too. Two old rivals (Leslie Brooks and Ramsay Ames) show up to put a jalapeño into their plan, and the heat is certainly on, especially when the real play authors arrive to produce the same play.

Davis, getting the longest run on Broadway (in her nylons), is the queen of self-deprecating comedy, tossing off wisecracks like Gypsy Rose Lee did articles of clothing. The four women surrounding her have great comic timing but are virtually indistinguishable from the others. Still, this is a fast moving example of how the absurdity of these musical comedy plots could be so much fun. Davis even gets to do the famous vaudeville routine, "Pay the five dollars" (also seen in the MGM extravaganza "Ziegfeld Follies"), reminding audiences that she was the funny woman of Hollywood long before Lucy conquered the small screen. A patriotic production number wraps it all up, reminding the audience in 1943 that a war was going on even though there had been no mention of it for the previous hour.