Seen It:
Yes

Hal Roach Studios

It would be fair to say that James Cagney was to Jack Warner what Bette Davis was to Jack Warner - a royal pain in the butt! (Except, of course, once their performances were actually hitting the silver screen). Both of these great actors had brought a lot of street smarts with them when they came out West from New York, and fighting it out with the Boss seemed to be as natural as falling off a log. Something to Sing About was the direct result of Cagney's successful bearing of the lion in his own den.

Cagney was working for two Hollywood veterans in Victor Schertzinger and Eddie Alperson, and they managed to assemble a cast which, if not star-studded, was laden with some of the most well-liked character actors in Hollywood. Bill Frawley portrayed Cagney's press agent (what else?), Gene Lockhart appeared as the euphemistically-named studio boss "B.O." (sound anything like "J.L."?), and Johnny Arthur, famed as Darla Hood's whining father in the "Our Gang" Comedies, got laughs as the effeminate studio "yes" man. An unknown starlet, twenty year old Evelyn Daw, bowed as Cagney's love interest.

Something to Sing About was part of an apparent 1937 effort on the part of Hollywood to contemplate its own navel as, in the manner of that year's classic Hollywood Hotel, the film took a jaundiced look at moviemaking and played it for laughs.
Something to Sing About features several top musical numbers in that wonderful 1930's style, which feature Cagney doing that which he always professed he most enjoyed - singing and dancing. Something to Sing About is a fun-filled, long-unseen example of Depression-Era escapism, where everyone can sing on key, dance like a gazelle, and everything turns out just swell in the end. What more could you want?