Zis Boom Bah ~ 1941 -BW

QUICKIE: Tough broad leaves Vaudville to set her son straight while he's still at college. She turns an ice cream parlor into a nightclub and the spoiled college brats ruin the rest of the film with bad "entertainment" bits.

PLOT: A singer leaves Vaudeville to spy on her estranged son at college. She finds him a spoiled rich kid and decides to change him without revealing her identity as his mother. She buys the local ice cream parlor and turns it into a nightclub where she coaxes her son and his friends to perform. The college's football team has a miraculous winning year which saves the failing school from banckruptcy.

SUMMARY: Grace Hayes takes over the town by buying the college's most influential people off: her son who lives on credit and his gang of ingrate friends who are obviously just with him for his money. There's alot of mean biting comments flying around. It made me uncomfortable. People are better behaved today than they were in that movie. In the middle of the film she passive-aggresively, insultingly motivates them all into working for her and the whole rest of the film is ruined with bad musical bits. But apparently because of her and her money she gets the college football team to win. I didn't understand that bit, but let's just pretend she's actually that motivating. This saves the college from banckruptcy and the kid's entertainmaent is a hit. Her son somehow figures out she's his mother and they reunite with her a hero in the end.

This is one of those: "I want to work with my family" pictures. So the actors have great presence, but the film is so lacking that you wish there had been more meat to it. Apparently Grace Hayes was a headliner in vaudeville and the mother of actor Peter Lind Hayes who plays her son in this film. Her character is so awesome I wished for a long drawn out story of her controling everyone with her money. But we only get half of that picture and the rest is musical bits. The first half was great, but I started fast forwarding through the numbers. Seriously, this Mae-West-wanna-be should have done more movies.