This is a must-see and one of the best documentaries - and films - of this year.

In truth, any opportunity to see the film on the big screen is welcome.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

I didn't like the ending in this 1953 entertaining movie. Nice seeing David Wayne attempting a song and dance routine. Even though he mouthed the words, he got through it nicely.The film tells the story of the making of a film based on Broadway luminary Eva Tanguay.The dances and the songs centered around the theme of I don't care are marvelously staged.Wayne appears in and out of the film and his telephone drunk scene was so similar to when he gave up Susan Hayward (Jane Froman) to Rory Calhoun via the phone again the year before in "With A Song in My Heart."The film tells of different men in her life telling her story with differences that seem to come all together at the end.

There's really a lack of cleverness in this "biography" of the forgotten "I Don't Care" girl Eva Tanguay who was a major vaudeville and musical revue star of the early 1900's. What had already been done (and much better) by Paramount with two films starring Betty Hutton about former stars Texas Guinan and Blossom Seeley became an imitation of her life which switched the facts around to make her more sympathetic than she probably was. Even with her as the leading heroine, she's not all that sympathetic, and pretty much a hot-tempered star who was notorious for her off-screen antics. In real life, Tanguay took a number away from the rising Sophie Tucker, while here, that is blamed on another star, played by Hazel Brooks, for doing the same thing to her.There's no sense in breaking the story down by producer George Jessel's attempts to film Eva's story by talking to two of the men who knew her best and trying to find the one she loved for years. David Wayne plays a drunken partner whose career fell apart as hers rose (think of a vaudeville version of "A Star is Born") and Oscar Levant an egotistical producer who claims his version is the truth. Other than the first version of the title song (performed as she ambles up from the stage to a box), the numbers are badly staged, the Ziegfeld Follies reprise of "I Don't Care" seeming more like something Marilyn Monroe would have turned down in present day character than something the real Eva would have done in 1906.There's not even enough novelty numbers to make this entertaining enough, even though Wayne does get to reprise "This is My Favorite City" which Dan Dailey and Betty Grable had done with more success in "Mother Wore Tights". In fact, there's really little story, and at under 80 minutes, this really never gets a chance to develop Eva as a real character and make her interesting beyond simply being an almost forgotten historical entertainment figure. Mitzi Gaynor does her best in the title role, doing what she's directed to do, but overall this ranks as one of her few disappointments.

What could have been a potentially interesting glimpse at a talent that has receded in the public memory is instead a garish collection of disconnected scenes. To start the framing device of having George Jessel mounting a biography of Eva Tanguay is a wasted and contrived waste of time and should have been scuttled. Then the story such as it is tells you nothing of the real Miss Tanguay.Mitzi is a talented girl, an excellent dancer and pleasing personality but she is given little too work with but she does wear feathers well. None of the male actors are given characters that make any sense. At least Oscar Levant gives his patented amusingly dry performance and gets a spotlight piano number which is the best thing in the movie. The leading man Bob Graham playing the fictitious Larry Woods is so bland he practically evaporates from the screen and makes no impact in the picture at all. If you like flashy production numbers, staged by the legendary Jack Cole, than this has plenty to enjoy but if you want narrative structure along with them you won't find that here.

The musical comedy biopic gets the Rashomon treatment in this faked-up biopic of Eva Tanguay, one of the great stars of turn-of-the-century vaudeville. Mitzi Gaynor, as always, gives a great performance and it's a pity that, with the exception of the movie version of SOUTH PACIFIC, she was always Fox's B musical star, doing whatever they gave her. The musical numbers are all overdone, as if choreographer Jack Cole is mocking the form; the semi-strip-tease to jazzed up Mozart (I'm not making this up! It's the most out-of-place dance number outside of Sally Forrest's weird one in EXCUSE MY DUST) and other numbers that recall LADY IN THE DARK -- all very modern for the era and absolutely bizarre in context.Oscar Levant plays the piano magnificently a few times and David Wayne gives a typically graceful performance in support.