Strictly Dynamite

Moxie Slaight is on the air, teaming with his lovely partner to send jokes and tunes into the living rooms of mainstream USA. But America is tuning out. Moxie needs a fresh gag writer to spark his radio show...and an opportunistic agent sets Moxie up with a hot new penman. And where does this creative scribe find his material? From the well-thumbed pages of old joke books!

Jimmy Durante delivers plenty of moxie and future Mexican Spitfire series star Lupe Velez is his cohort in this free-wheeling sendup of the era's radio days. It's not the most crazy-boned of Durante's films (that honor perhaps goes to Hollywood Party), but it does have the star's signature malaprops, Eugene Pallette as cowboy crooner Sourwood Sam and Schnozzola's Hot Patatta. Hotcha!

Six writers were involved in the RKO Radio musical comedy STRICTLY DYNAMITE; ironically, the plot concerns a radio comedian who's running out of material. Jimmy Durante stars as Maxie Slaight, an airwaves mirthmaker who hires young Nick Montgomery (Norman Foster) as his new gag man. Before he knows what's happening, Maxie becomes enmeshed in a romantic triangle involving Nick, Nick's wife Sylvia (Marian Nixon), and Maxie's radio co-star Vera (Lupe Velez). The film's five songs are performed con brio by Durante, Velez, and the four Mills Brothers. Adapted from an unproduced play by the usually reliable Ralph Spence, STRICTLY DYNAMITE wasn't sufficiently successful to boost Jimmy Durante's flagging movie career, and within a year or so he'd be back on Broadway in JUMBO.