Best Music Movies of 1936

A beautiful singer and a battling priest try to reform a Barbary Coast saloon owner in the days before the big earthquake.

I Love to Singa depicts the story of a young owl who wants to sing jazz, instead of the classical music that his German parents wish him to perform. The plot is a lighthearted tribute to Al Jolson's film The Jazz Singer.

When the fleet puts in at San Francisco, sailor Bake Baker tries to rekindle the flame with his old dancing partner, Sherry Martin, while Bake's buddy Bilge Smith romances Sherry's sister, Connie. But it's not all smooth sailing—Bake has a habit of losing Sherry's jobs for her and, despite Connie's dreams, Bilge is not ready to settle down.

Despite her mother's objections, the naive young daughter of a show boat captain is thrust into the limelight as the company's new leading lady.

Two sailors Sindbad and Popeye decide to test themselves in order to prove their supremacy. Popeye is then presented with a series of daunting tasks by Sindbad.

Chin-Ching gets lost in Shanghai and is befriended by American playboy Tommy Randall. She falls asleep in his car which winds up on a ship headed for America. Susan Parker, also on the ship, marries Randall to give Chin-Ching a family.

Cossetted and bored, Barbara Barry is finally sent off to school by her busy if doting widowed soap manufacturer father. When her nurse is injured en route, Barbara finds herself alone in town, ending up as part of radio song-and-dance act Dolan and Dolan sponsored by a rival soap company.

The three Craig sisters Penny, Kay, and Joan, go to New York to stop their divorced father from marrying gold digger Donna Lyons and re-unite him with their mother.

Opera singer, Marie de Flor, seeks out fugitive brother in the Canadian wilderness. During her trek, she meets a Canadian mountie, Sgt. Bruce, who is also searching for her brother. Romance ensues, resulting in several love duets between the two.

Lavish biography of Flo Ziegfeld, the producer who became Broadway's biggest starmaker.

Stan and Ollie travel with a band of 18th-century Gypsies holding a nobleman's daughter.

A young boy is forced to leave his family in the South and move in with relatives he doesn't know in New York.

Ted meets and falls in love with Nora Paige, an aspiring Broadway dancer who tries out for a show starring Lucy James. After Ted rescues Lucy's pet dog during a public relations campaign on his submarine, Lucy falls for him. Ted is ordered to meet Lucy for a date at a night club, who later sees their picture in the newspaper and no longer wants anything to do with him.

The partners of stage-producer J.?J. Hobart gamble away the money for his new show. They enlist a gold-digging chorus girl to help get it back by conning an insurance company. But they don’t count on the persistence of insurance man Rosmer Peck and his secretary Norma Perry.

Larry Poole, in prison on a false charge, promises an inmate that when he gets out he will look up and help out a family. The family turns out to be a young girl, Patsy Smith, and her elderly grandfather who need lots of help. This delays Larry from following his dream and going to Venice and becoming a gondolier. Instead, he becomes a street singer and, while singing in the street, meets a pretty welfare worker, Susan Sprague. She takes a dim view of Patsy's welfare under the guardianship of Larry and her grandfather and starts proceedings to have Patsy placed in an orphanage.

A famous singer, bored with music and fans, goes to live in Mexico. His manager sends a woman to bring him back. They fall in love.

The owner of a shoe polish company sponsors a radio show that showcases black performers. Since his wife's father put up the money to be the sponsor, she insists on singing on the show. She goes on after the main star, singer Nina Mae McKinney. The wife sings so badly that the sponsor's customers abandon him. He is forced to shine shoes on street corners, while Nina Mae and her boyfriend win a bet on a daily number and end up on easy street.

Irresponsible playboy Arthur Rawlings is sent by his uncle to work as a waiter at a hotel in the South of France. Arthur arranges for shop assistant Frances Travers, with whom he has fallen in love, to win a fairground lottery and stay in the hotel as a prize. Complications arise!

An amateur detective gets a chance to test his sleuthing skills when an opera singer is murdered at the Hollywood Bowl.

The "Caliban-Ariel" romance of fiftysomething John Barrymore and teenager Elaine Barrie is spoofed in this delightful 20th Century Fox musical. Adolphe Menjou plays the Barrymore counterpart, a loose-living movie star with a penchant for wine, women, and more wine. Alice Faye plays a nightclub singer hungry for publicity. Her agent (Gregory Ratoff) arranges a "romance" between Faye and Menjou. Eventually Faye winds up with Michael Whalen, allowing Menjou to continue his blissful, bibulous bachelorhood. Sing, Baby, Sing represented the feature-film debut of the Ritz Brothers, who are in top form in their specialty numbers--and who are awarded a final curtain call after the "The End" title, just so the audience won't forget them (The same device was used to introduce British actor George Sanders in Fox's Lancer Spy [37]).

A young man falls in love with a beautiful blonde. When he sees her being forced onto a luxury liner, he decides to follow and rescue her. However, he discovers that she is an English heiress who ran away from home and is now being returned to England. He also discovers that his boss is on the ship. To avoid discovery, he disguises himself as the gangster accomplice of a minister, who is actually a gangster on the run from the law.

Warner Baxter plays the ambitious producer of a burlesque show who rises to the big time on Broadway. Alice Faye is the loyal burleycue singer who helps make Baxter a success. His head turned by sudden fame, Baxter falls under the spell of a society woman (Mona Barrie) who has theatrical aspirations of her own. She marries Baxter, then convinces him to produce a string of "artistic" plays rather than his extravagant musical revues. The plays are flops, and the woman haughtily divorces Baxter. Faithful Alice Faye, who'd gone to London when her ex-beau was married, returns to the penniless Baxter. She and her burlesque buddies team up to pull Baxter out of his rut and put him on top again.

A love affair blossoms between two pairs of shoes after a couple purchases the shoes.

Princess is destined to marry the Emperor, until her sister steps in.

Bessie and Winston "Slug" Winters are married coaches whose mission is to whip their college football team into shape. Just in time, they discover a hillbilly farmhand and his sister. But the hillbilly farmhand's ability to throw melons enables him to become their star passing ace.

In this children's adventure, the children of a small town are enthralled by the tales of the town drunk.

Peyton Wells (Ben Lyon) rescues Judy Jones (Joan Marsh) from a very dull young man, at a sedate party given for her by her multi-millionaire grandfather Silas P. Jones (Purnell Pratt.) Judy refuses to accompany Peyton on a slumming trip to a cheap dance hall, and Peyton dances with several of the dowagers and tells them that Silas is practically dying of scarlet fever. The guests hastily depart and Joan joins Peyton at the Dreamland Dance Hall. She is mistaken by Jimmy Cassidy (Edward J. Nugent) as one of the hostesses and decides to dance with him as a lark. One thing follows another and Judy gets disinherited and takes a job at the dance hall through Jimmy and his friend Mabel(Isabel Jewell.) Jimmy confides to Judy his ambition to become a dance instructor over the radio and Judy decides to help him but can't get the needed financial backing. She gets Peyton to front the money, promising him she will reconsider his offer of marriage if Jimmy's plan fails.

Believing real life is an operetta, the citizens of the European country Lucco break into song at every blink of an eye. Since everybody's singing, nobody works, there's no money to pay taxes, and the country faces bankruptcy, leading the ruling princess to declare all music illegal. Enter opera singer Richard Tauber and American journalist Jimmy Durante to save the day and lead the citizens to march on the palace in protest--and in song.

When a group of World War 1 buddies head west to farmstead, they run into trouble.

A young British woman, tricked into believing she was used during a whirlwind romance, marries a gentle widowed Italian opera star, whose songs she and her first love shared.

Flying from one charming lady---eluding another---and almost losing both!

A cowboy realizes too late that his girlfriend's father had been cheated out of everything in a crooked card game. He sets out to get revenge on the crooks.

A cream-of-the-crop gathering of 1930's radio stars, who lend themselves to a storyline about a failing radio station which needs to put on a huge ratings winner to have any chance of continued operation. An interesting mixture of the stars whose fame continued to grow, those who became bit players in show business history, and those who have been forgotten entirely, except at the Internet Movie Database of course!

Jonathan Pride is a mild-mannered dance instructor in 1820 Boston. En route to visit relatives, Jonathan is shanghaied by a band of zany pirates and forced to work as a galley boy. When the pirate vessel arrives at the port of Las Palomas, Jonathan, clad in buccaneer's garb, makes his escape. Everyone in Las Palomas, including Governor Alcalde (Frank Morgan) and fetching senorita Serafina (Steffi Duna), assumes that Jonathan is the pirate chieftain, leading to a series of typical comic-opera complications.

Edna's grandfather is a conductor of a small orchestra that gives concerts in the park every Sunday. Because of lack of audience the city officials want to cancel these concerts. To stop this from happening, Judy and Edna gather a crowd the following Sunday; and to keep its attention, they themselves perform with the orchestra. Edna sings an aria and Judy sings 'Americana'.

A woman reporter is hired by an author-songwriter to help him avoid additional breach-of-promise suits.

A doctor develops pills that make Hal a great tap dancer. Lola Green sees Hal dancing in a drugstore and asks him to join her vaudeville show. Everything is fine until Hal's pills disappear.

At the Texas Centennial in Dallas Autry confuses two girls by being himself and his own stunt double. When cowboy star Tom Ford disappears, Wilson gets his double Gene Autry to impersonate him. But Ford owes gangster Rico $10,000 and Rico arrives to collect. He fails to get the money but learns that Autry is an impersonator and now blackmails Wilson and his movie studio. Original version runs 71 minutes, edited version runs 59 minutes.

Napoleon Bonaparte's younger brother, visiting the United States, falls madly in love with a young woman he meets in Baltimore.

An impoverished team of composer and songwriter try to secure financial backing for their new musical, with the assistance of a struggling actress working as a housemaid.

Louis Prima, between song numbers, tells how he happened to get a job in a Hollywood cafe playing music while a couple, unrelated to anything else, play a slot machine in the background. This short was reissued in 1944 and again in 1952. Lucille Ball has a bit part. Song numbers include; "Way Down Yonder in New Orleans", "Up a Lazy River", "Dinah","Basin Street Blues" and "Johnny Get Your Gun."

An orphan (Eight-year-old boy soprano Bobby Breen) gets a chance to sing opera in New York.

Opera singer Chivo is currently playing a singing cowboy, and Mexican bandito Braganza kidnaps him (along with Jane, an heiress) so he can learn to become more like the American movie gangsters he admires.

A group of musicians is determined to appear on a radio program.

In this Vitaphone Melody Masters short, Red Nichols and his band entertain the viewer with a selection of pop songs.

A dark and stormy night in a drugstore. The druggist mixes a potion and falls asleep. The skull-and-crossbones on the bottle comes to life and drips the potion on the druggist…

A British diplomat falls in love with a famous singer when he meets her in Cannes.

The Indians need the Buffalo to survive and the Government has promised to keep the herds free from hunters. But Carter, of Carter and Barton, just signed a big contract for furs and Buffalo meat so they want the herds. The only way they can get them is to rile the Indians up enough to go on the warpath and break the treaty. After the trouble starts, the Indians get the Colonel's daughter and hold her prisoner. Written by Tony Fontana

Neurotic Broadway star Al Jackson faces professional ruin when he loses his voice. While recuperating in the country, he falls in love with farm girl Ruth Haines, the pretty aunt of precocious little Sybil Haines.