Warner Bros., 1937. Director: Ray Enright. Musical numbers directed by: Bobby Connolly. Screenplay: Jerry Wald, Sid Herzig, Warren Duff, based on a story by Richard Macaulay. Camera: Sol Polito. Film editor: Doug Gould. Cast: Ruby Keeler, Lee Dixon, Ross Alexander, Allen Jenkins, Louise Fazenda, Carol Hughes, Wini Shaw. Songs: Johnny Mercer, Richard Whiting.
In the past I haven’t given much space in this column to musicals—but, like so many of my fellow enthusiasts, I love a good film musical. Needless to say, some musicals are better than others. The 1930s were a particularly rich time for the musical film, producing more than their share of the all-time classics of the genre. Notable among these were the lavish Warner Bros. musicals of the mid-30s, featuring the deliriously spectacular production numbers of Busby Berkeley. In the hard early years of the Great Depression, films like 42nd Street and Gold Diggers of 1933 contributed immeasurably to the morale of the nation with their extravagant fantasy, topical yet timeless songs, and cheerfully buoyant energy.
This cycle was wildly popular at first, but its vogue was short-lived. By 1935 box-office returns were already starting to taper off, and audiences were moving on to smaller-scale, more sophisticated musicals, in particular the RKO series starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Warners, always alert to trends in audience taste, began to phase out their gargantuan spectacles. In their place the studio offered more intimate musicals, retaining some elements of their previous hits but mixing them up in new combinations. The result was a series of lower-profile program features, many all but forgotten today, but offering their own sparkling moments of musical cinema that are ripe for rediscovery.
Such an overlooked gem is Ready, Willing and Able, released in the spring of 1937. Like so many of its predecessors, Ready, Willing and Able is a backstage musical. Ruby Keeler, a mainstay of Warners’ musical franchise, appears once again (without her familiar costar Dick Powell) as a young unknown with ambitions for a stage career. She gets her big break by accident, in the form of a pair of penniless songwriters trying for their big break. Here the songwriters are portrayed by Lee Dixon, a lanky, loose-limbed tap dancer who had scored a success in Gold Diggers of 1937, and Ross Alexander, a frequent supporting player who was slowly gaining leading-man status. Through a chain of misunderstandings, the songwriters mistake Ruby for another performer, an established musical-comedy star with the same name—a star none of them have ever seen, who is currently appearing overseas—and cajole her into appearing in their new show. Reluctant at first to accept this opportunity under false pretenses, Ruby finally lets herself be talked into it, and a producer agrees to stage the show on the strength of her (the real star’s) name.
One little problem: Ruby is an accomplished dancer, but—in the world of this film—she can’t sing. (In real life, of course, Ruby Keeler had a perfectly acceptable singing voice and had vocalized in numerous films since 1933.) By manufacturing a series of excuses and pretexts she goes through weeks of rehearsal without ever having to sing. Inevitably, of course, her accidental deception is exposed. At the same time, the real star, currently in London, learns of the American impostor and sails for New York with litigation on her mind. Her threat is made more intimidating by casting the role with a bona fide musical star: Wini Shaw—the same Winifred Shaw who had recently introduced “The Lady in Red” and the Academy Award-winning “Lullaby of Broadway.” 
Ensuing events lead to some unexpected plot twists, which I will not detail here, before the requisite happy ending.
All this is great fun, but as with so many musicals, the plot exists primarily as a vehicle to get us from one musical number to the next. And, happily, the numbers are excellent. In place of the powerhouse songwriting team of Al Dubin and Harry Warren, who had dominated the Warners musicals of earlier years, the studio offered a relative newcomer: Johnny Mercer, still in the early stages of what would become a stellar songwriting career of his own. For this film Mercer teamed with veteran composer Richard Whiting to produce a sparkling score, highlighted by “Too Marvelous for Words,” a song that became an instant standard. Similarly, celebrity dance director Busby Berkeley was not on board here; the numbers were staged by Bobby Connolly. But Connolly was starting to accumulate a track record of his own, and offered his own modest nod to Berkeleyan spectacle with his climactic staging of “Too Marvelous for Words.” Here, in a takeoff on the theme of words, Dixon and Keeler perform a tap routine on the keys of a giant typewriter!
In short, Ready, Willing and Able is one more film that deserves better than its latter-day obscurity. The viewer who seeks it out will be rewarded with an enjoyable film experience, thanks to its own highlights as well as its links to other overlooked musical gems.
