Show Girl In Hollywood

"Hollywood is my one big chance, and I'm going to grab it!" struggling Broadway chorine Dixie Dugan tells her skeptical boyfriend after a big-shot Hollywood director discovers her. Well, at least the director claims to be a big shot. So begins Dixie's odyssey into the hustle and heartbreak of Tinseltown.

Archetypal flapper Alice White - likened to a platinum-haired Clara Bow - returns as Dixie (a role she played two years prior in Show Girl) in a film that both celebrates and skewers Hollywood. Long-time silent star Blanche Sweet portrays the actress who finds her career a washout at 32. And the film's glimpses of crew members operating the on-set camera and recording machinery make it a time capsule of technology.

This wonderful Warner Bros. epic was one of the earliest talkie musicals with a Hollywood background -- and the last of its kind until 1933's SITTING PRETTY. Alice White stars as pert chorine Dixie Dugan, a character she'd played in 1928's SHOW GIRL (and one which would spin off into a long-running comic strip). This time, Dixie is brought to Hollywood to appear in a music titled THE RAINBOW GIRL. Thanks to the urgings of her egotistical director (John Miljan), the normally down-to-earth heroine begins acting like a haughty screen queen. Her temperamental behavior causes a shut-down of the production, ruining the comeback attempt of fading star Donna Harris (played by Blanche Sweet, who at 36 looks far younger than her "over-the-hill" character, who's supposed to be 32!) When Donna nearly commits suicide, Dixie realizes what a jerk she's been, and the show -- er, the movie -- goes on. A surprisingly accurate scene from SHOW GIRL IN HOLLYWOOD, showing a musical number "in production" on the sound stage has since been excerpted in several TV documentaries on the early sound era. The film originally ended with a Technicolor sequence depicting the premiere of the fictional THE RAINBOW GIRL, with several Warner Bros. employees (Al Jolson, Ruby Keeler, Loretta Young and Walter Pidgeon) in attendance.