The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

Blistering performances.

The still lovely Jane Powell stars as a musical student whose older sister (Constance Moore) is a burlesque star unbeknownst to Ms. Powell. After discovering the truth, Jane decides to help make her sister legit with the help of Broadway producer (Ralph Bellamy). The rest is predictable, yet entertaining, and features a top-notch cast of supporting players including Arthur Treacher and Louise Beavers, plus the usual group of rowdy, boy-crazy teenage girls. (Has nothing changed?) The musical numbers are rather second rate, but there are a lot of amusing bits of comedy. After this, Ms. Powell went over to MGM, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Poor plot, dire music, amateurish dancing, but surprisingly likable overall! The screenplay is quite witty and the acting in the minor parts is excellent. Better directed and photographed than most musicals of this type the time passes quite nicely. Watch for amusing cameos by stalwarts Arthur Treacher and Louise Beavers. There are a number of glaring inconsistencies and holes in the plot. Morton Gould, surely the least charismatic band leader ever to star in and write the music for a musical, plays just the sort of dull symphonic schmaltz that is apparently holding back the prospects of Arthur Hale's new production, while Josephine's shocking burlesque act shows a great deal less leg than her interminable number in a legitimate play at the end of the film.

In the '30s and '50s the Hollywood musical did mostly Broadway-style material, but during the WW2 period there was a craze for the vaudeville era: "For Me and My Gal", "Lady of Burlesque", "Ziegfeld Girl", and many more. These musicals were always best when they cast real ex-vaudevillians (Judy Garland) or Broadway dancers (Barbara Stanwyck). This one doesn't have either but it's not too bad. As usual with no-budget musicals there isn't a lot of music in it, and though it's got some burlesque sequences of course there are no authentic burlesque (i.e., stripper) numbers. (The censorship period in Hollywood was a bad time to get nostalgic for burlesque.) There is one clever dance number, with the dancers are got up as marionettes at a fair.Ralph Bellamy is an impresario and Powell is the cute girl who dreams of Carnegie Hall and discovers (it is never a secret to us) that her "theatrical" sister (Moore) is really a burlesque queen. Powell dreams up a way to redeem the sister. Never mind that Powell and Moore look nothing alike and don't appear to like one another. Moore, who made only Z movies, seems to sense that Powell was on to bigger and better things (she was but not for very long). Powell is a bit annoying in the early scenes, but she gets rather funny later once she's swathed in mink and pretending to be a diva. All in all, this is kind of a fun period piece. It's more typical of 1940s musicals than the big classics everyone knows about.

An early outing for Jane Powell as Sherry, a student at a musical school who yearns for a career on the stage, like her elder sister Jo (Constance Moore). But the fat is in the fire when Sherry travels to New York to see her sister on the stage, and finds out that she's not a top Broadway actress, but "Bubbles Barton" the burlesque queen.Jane P does the annoying little sister thing as well as Shirley Temple did in "The Bachelor And The Bobby-Soxer", though at least this time she's not in love with the older man (phew!). "Delightfully Dangerous" starts off a bit slowly, but soon picks up, and is a treat to watch - except for the final musical number which drags on for what seems like hours. No one suddenly breaks out into song in this musical, all the numbers are the ones on the stage, so only one of them really seems to fit into the storyline at all. Constance Moore was brilliant as Bubbles, and the definite standout star of the movie has to be Arthur Treacher (one of my childhood favourites!) as Jeffers the butler. Remarkably witty as always, even he has seen the infamous Bubbles on stage and thinks she has "a wonderful pair of - eyes."