Pick a Star (1937)

(On Cable TV, May 2021) I have a big soft spot for the Hollywood-insider movies of the 1930s, selling a fantasy version of “Hollywood behind the scenes” that usually featured a young woman arriving in Los Angeles with big dreams, and various people helping her out to stardom. Pick a Star is made slightly more notable by two sequences—comic sketches, essentially—with none other than Laurel and Hardy, either breaking bottles over each other’s heads or playing abdominal harmonica. There’s the requisite (and reliably enjoyable) glimpse “behind the camera,” a few cameos of celebrities long forgotten, a mostly innocuous heroine (Rosina Lawrence, who exited Hollywood two years later and, I’m amazed to discover, was born in Ottawa!), an implausibly-motivated heroic male (Jack Haley) and an amiable atmosphere despite the constant threat of not making it in Hollywood and having to return home for a good solid life away from the cameras. Pick a Star definitely belongs to a specific Hollywood subgenre, but it rises to the standards of the form and it’s hard to ask for much more than that.