BLONDE INSPIRATION (1941)

Silly B-comedy directed by Busby Berkeley; he was a great and innovative chreographer but as a director, he tends toward the bland. John Shelton is an aspiring writer who thinks of himself as an undiscoverered literary genius. He gets involved with two unscrupulous fellows (Albert Dekker and Charles Butterworth) who run a Western pulp magazine. They are just about to sell the magazine and leave the business when their only writer (Donald Meek) leaves them high and dry in an alcoholic daze (his condition is played for laughs here). Although Shelton thinks the Westens are below him, the editors get him to write an entire issue of stories in one day, with some help from a pretty secretary (Virginia Grey); they also extract money from him to keep the mag afloat until the sale. Farce ensues. In an interesting twist at the end, it turns out that Shelton is not a good literary writer but he's great at the pulps! Shelton is unattractive and uncharismatic, and most of the film is flat and tedious, although you can see Dekker and Butterworth trying hard. Reginald Owen, in a small role as Shelton's uncle, is a bright spot. The plot is basically an uncredited variation on George S. Kaufman's farce, "The Butter and Egg Man," which itself was made into a movie six times, most notably as AN ANGEL FROM TEXAS with Eddie Albert. [TCM]