This is a comedic detective story in the vein of the Thin Man movies.  Melvyn Douglas plays a rare book dealer who dabbles in book related detective work, along with his wife/secretary (Florence Rice). This movie spawned two sequels in 1939, each with different actors playing the lead.

Familiar faces: Thurston Hall (TV's Topper) and Nat Pendleton, who got surprisingly high billing considering he's only in two short scenes.

Trailer for Fast Company on TCM

Melvyn Douglas and Florence Rice

What passes for risque in 1938

"Hays Code" marital beds

Thurston Hall, TV's "Topper"

Nat Pendleton

Bill Norman (Allan Lane), son of  milk magnate Rufus Norman (George Irving), has decided he wants to be some sort of ichthyologist or marine biologist instead of going into the family dairy business. His dad refuses to fund this expensive hobby but makes a wager with Bill that if he can work at the dairy for one month, flawlessly, then he will let Bill use the family yacht for six months for a South American marine science expedition. Bill accepts, thinking he will be an executive, only to find out that he will serve the time as a milk delivery man. Bill nevertheless performs his job cheerfully and on his route meets Sheila (Joan Fontaine), who appears to be a maid. Sheila is in fact a debutante, although her family is currently short on income. Sheila starts dating Bill thinking he is a lowly milkman, who in turn thinks Sheila is a lowly maid. This the reverse of the plot of Hold That Kiss, where both parties are working class but pretend to be upper class.

The movie opens with Billy Gilbert playing a fish monger involved in an auto accident. He doesn't do the same kind of routine I was so fond of in Happy Landing or My Lucky Star.

Familiar faces: Cecil Kellaway plays the Norman family butler, and thirty years later played Monsignor Ryan in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. Hedda Hopper played Sheila's mother. Also, Allan Lane was the voice of Mr. Ed.

Joan Fontaine and Allan Lane

Billy Gilbert

Cecil Kellaway

George Irving and Hedda Hopper

Okay, follow along: Richard Dix plays Paul Dover, an American sculptor living in Paris. Paul's sister Ellen also lives in Paris, and is being blackmailed by a former beau with some love letters she wrote. Paul has friends in low places and agrees to steal the letters from the blackmailer. Paul and his criminal neighbor succeed in getting the letters, but in a botched getaway the letters are secreted in some antique furniture bound for a museum in Los Angeles. The blackmailer also has some criminal friends and they set out to retrieve the stolen letters. Paul travels to LA ahead of his competitors and comes up with a master plan to find the letters: he will pretend to be blind, thereby getting special permission to explore the museum unescorted (this outcome was not obvious to me, but apparently he was right). Paul buys a seeing-eye dog (Ace, the Wonder Dog) and sets his plan in motion. The bad guys put one of their own (Paul Guilfoyle) undercover as a janitor but he is too clumsy and loses his access. The bad guys try to recruit blind Paul Dover to their cause, not knowing he is working against them. Yada yada things work out in the end, the letters are destroyed, Paul gets the lovely museum curator (Whitney Bourne) and the dog.

Paul Guilfoyle and Richard Dix

Whitney Bourne, Ace the Wonder Dog, and Richard Dix

Richard Dix plays 'Stag' Cahill, an ex-military commercial pilot who is coerced into serving as the assistant to uber-disciplinarian Colonel Stockton (Harry Carey), who is charged with turning the Trans-World Air Line School of Aeronautics into the best darned pilot school in the world. Colonel Stockton's son Ken enlists in the school, and he and Cahill engage in an escalating game of pranks to vie for alpha dog position.  Ken is played by Chester Morris, who was the special prosecutor in my last movie, Smashing the Rackets.

The action of the movie culminates in a plane crash in the arctic wilderness, from which Ken and Stag must hike for days through the mountains before reaching safety.

The real meat of this movie is that both Stag and Ken love Meg, played by Joan Fontaine. Meg marries one but loves the other. It all gets straightened out in the end.

Joan Fontaine and her sister Olivia de Havilland are still alive.

This is the story of a gung-ho special prosecutor who rids the city of organized crime "rackets" of the gambling, protection, and (ahem) entertainment variety. Inspired by the real life exploits of Thomas E. Dewey.

Jim 'Socker' Conway (Chester Morris), former FBI agent and night school lawyer, becomes a special prosecutor with the D.A.'s office. Using a combination of trickery and disregard for search warrants he breaks a slot machine racket, a numbers racket, and finally brings down the kingpin, a lawyer who has been consolidating the protection rackets under his own leadership.  Conway also gets the girl (after her sister, a wayward lass, commits suicide by automobile).

Familiar face: Byron Foulger, who normally played some sort of clerk.  In this one he was a chemist producing a "nausea gas". He also played Wendell the train conductor on Petticoat Junction.

Byron Foulger

Judy (Judy Garland) is a troublemaker.  She can't stop singing swing music and this gets her kicked out of the best girls schools in New York. Upon returning home from her latest expulsion she finds her house in chaos. Her playwright father and actress mother are having trouble keeping backers for their play, and Judy's mother (played by Billie Burke) insists on keeping Jerrold, a flattering ham, as her leading man. Rounding out the household is Olga (Fannie Brice) the immigrant housekeeper, Ricky the chef who moonlights as a nightclub singer, and Sylvia, Judy's sister and the apple of Ricky's eye. Judy tries to get a job singing at the nightclub to help with the family finances, but her father disapproves, fires Ricky and sends Judy on an educational trip to Europe. She ditches the ship before it sails and goes to work on Ricky's new Broadway production. On opening day Judy is found out, Ricky declares his love for Sylvia, and the show is a smashing success.

I don't really know anything about Fannie Brice. She was the subject of the movie Funny Girl but due to an unfortunate gap in my movie knowledge I don't think I have ever seen it. In Everybody Sing she does a song as "Baby Snooks", a character my Mom says she remembers listening to on the radio.

Judy Garland performs a song in blackface. In the context of the movie she is not just performing in blackface but actually pretending to be black.  Here is a snippet of dialog:

Ricky: "What's your name?"
Judy: "Opal Pearl Washington and I'm one of twins. Emerald Ruby passed on but my mammy didn't mind so much cause we have twelve others, all twins."

 

Judy Garland in blackface

Joan Bennett plays Kay Kerrigan, who is goaded into shooting a man she blames for her sister's suicide. She then drives her car into the San Francisco bay while eluding the police. She is presumed dead, but actually begins a globe-trotting life on the lamb. The police hire freelance detective and playboy Sam Wye (Fredric March) to track her down. Along with oafish police detective Blodgett (Ralph Bellamy) and later his wisecracking secretary Jean Livingstone (Ann Sothern), Wye tracks her from the Territory of Hawaii to Japan, Shanghai, Saigon (then in Indochina, now in Vietnam), Singapore, Colombo (then in Ceylon, now in Sri Lanka) and Bombay. Sam and Kay fall in love, and Blodgett falls for Livingstone. They are forced to return to San Francisco by super detective George Faulkiner, where Wye proves that Kerrigan was not guilty of the murder that she believed she had committed.

Two Robert Osborne comments about this movie: most of the acting is done in front of projected scenes from the exotic locales that were visited.  The director, Tay Garnett, had taken extensive footage of a vacation cruise around the world a year or two before, and had talked the studio into letting him use the footage in this movie. Second, as part of the plot of this movie Joan Bennett dyes her blonde hair brunette in order to conceal her identity.  She had always played blondes up until this point and ever after played a brunette.



Familiar face: the San Fransisco police commissioner is played by Thomas Mitchell, who was Uncle Billy in It's a Wonderful Life.