Swing High, Swing Low

Skid Johnson is a soldier on his last day in Panama, and Maggie misses her boat because of him and stays; he plays trumpet in a nightclub, goes to New York and success, drinks it away, and she comes back to get him through a broadcast. The play Burlesque again, with the comic turned into a trumpet player, and the best of its three films. Fred MacMurray, who had been a saxophone player in dance bands, holds the trumpet like a man who has held one, and Carole Lombard plays the second half without a laugh in it. Mitchell Leisen for Paramount, 1937.