DANCING CO-ED (1939)

Cute little second-feature comedy with Lana Turner in her first starring role. The story begins in Hollywood, as dancing star Lee Bowman discovers that his movie partner is pregnant. A press agent (Roscoe Karns) talks the studio boss into running a national collegiate contest to find Bowman's next partner, for a movie called "Dancing Co-Ed." The trick is that Karns plants starlet wannabe Turner at a midwestern university (conveniently called Midwestern University) to be found by the studio judges. Karns' secretary (Ann Rutherford) goes along to help her with her school work. Richard Carlson is a student reporter who (in a far-fetched plot twist) suspects a studio plant and sets out to uncover her, never realizing that it's Turner, who deliberately gets to close to Carlson to throw him off her trail. Of course, the two start to fall in love for real and complications ensue. At 90 minutes, the movie is a little too long, with a middle section that feels padded, but the actors are all pleasant and the plot just twisty enough to keep your attention. Karns and Bowman are both particularly good, and Monty Woolley has a small role as a professor, but even better is Leon Errol, known mostly for his comedy shorts of the 30's and for the Mexican Spitfire movies of the 40's; here, he's Turner's loving father, a former vaudeville performer who has a very amusing scene pretending to be an actor who is pretending to be Turner's father (yes, I proofread that sentence--it's correct). Bandleader Artie Shaw, who would marry Turner in 1940, plays himself. Fun for Saturday morning viewing. [TCM]