Diamond Horseshoe **** (1945, Betty Grable, Dick Haymes, Phil Silvers, Margaret Dumont, William Gaxton) – Classic Movie Review 11,044

Writer-director George Seaton’s 1945 Technicolor treat film Diamond Horseshoe [Billy Rose’s Diamond Horseshoe] is based on the 1928 play The Barker by John Kenyon Nicholson, which has fun with Freudian psychoanalysis, and stars Betty Grable, Dick Haymes, Phil Silvers and Margaret Dumont, with a score by Harry Warren and Mack Gordon. It is a remake of two films derived from the play’s same story, The Barker (1928) and Hoop-La (1933). Grable plays the role taken by Dorothy Mackaill in The Barker and Clara Bow in Hoop-La.

There a smashing score for this most pleasant, highly entertaining 20th Century Fox Forties musical in the company of pleasing stars Betty Grable and Dick Haymes as a scheming glamorous dancer showgal and a medical student who wants to chuck up doctoring for a career as a singer. Phil Silvers and Margaret Dumont are the icing on the cake with their expert silly comedy as Blinky Walker and Mrs Standish.

The show is set in Billy Rose’s Diamond Horseshoe nightclub in the Paramount Hotel in Manhattan, where Joe Davis Sr (William Gaxton) is the owner and MC and Bonnie Collins (Grable) is the leggy main attraction. Haymes plays the owner’s son Joe Davis Jr, who defies his dad to fall for Grable and go for showbiz.

Harry Warren and Mack Gordon’s hit numbers include the evergreen ‘The More I See You’ (beautifully sung by Haymes), ‘In Acapulco’, ‘Play Me an Old fashioned Melody’. ‘You’ll Never Know’ and ‘I Wish I Knew’ (sung by Dick Haymes and Betty Grable) and the old songs include ‘The Aba-Daba Honeymoon, ‘If I Knew I’d Find You’ and ‘Let Me Call You Sweetheart’.

Grable and Haymes are at their best and writer-director Seaton does a superb job in this Technicolor delight.

William Gaxton, Phil Silvers and Dick Haymes in Diamond Horseshoe.

In a windfall for Billy Rose, 20th Century Fox spent $75,000 for the rights to call the movie club Billy Rose’s Diamond Horseshoe, under a contract that forced it to release the movie under that name. That $75,000 would have been enough to finance a whole British film of the era, but it is nothing on Fox’s generous $2,600,000 budget. The film was a hit, taking $3,150,000 (US), but because of its high cost struggled to make a profit. Grable’s other film of 1945, The Dolly Sisters, was one of Fox’s highest-grossing films that year.

It is shot in Billy Rose’s Diamond Horseshoe, a nightclub located in the basement of the Paramount Hotel, as well as at Stage 15, 20th Century Fox Studios, 10201 Pico Blvd., Century City, Los Angeles.

Also in the cast are Beatrice Kaye, Carmen Cavallaro (as himself, ‘The Poet of the Piano’), Willie Solar, Bess Flowers, Dick Eliott, Hal K Dawson, Eddie Acuff, Jean Fenwick, Edward Gargan, Julie London, Milton Kibbee, Reed Hadley, Ferdinand Munier, Cyril Ring, Barbara Sears, Harry Seymour, Phil Tead, Ray Teal, Eric Wilton, Herbert Heywood, Cathy Downs, Charles Cane and Alex Melesh.

© Derek Winnert 2021 Classic Movie Review 11,044

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