If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

The flimsy story is an excuse for a wonderful parade of some of our favorite stars - some of them doing unusual or uncharacteristic things, and doing them rather well. Alan Ladd for instance joins Dorothy Lamour in singing "Tallahassee", whilst the ultra-lively Pearl Bailey has "Tired", and Gary Cooper saddles up a wooden horse on a carousel! True, there is a bit overmuch propaganda for the Variety Club for my taste and it's surprising other show-business personalities didn't object to the Club's annual banquet being turned into an all-Paramount affair. On the other hand, there's so much fun and good humor in the picture, plus of course, an inside view of Paramount Studios (very much confettied and hokied-up of course, but still more entertaining than a realistic tour of Monogram, say), that Variety Girl is hard to resist.

This was arguably the last of the 'all-star' spectaculars generated by the second world war and alas it ranks a bad nowhere to such admittedly ho hum entries as Hollywood Canteen and Thank Your Lucky Stars. On the plus side buffs will welcome the chance to see Frank Ferguson in a rare leading role and whilst it's true than many of the Paramount 'names' are wasted there is the odd moment - Ray Milland answers the phone in his dressing room by removing it from the porcelain bowl below the ceiling light and Alad Ladd reveals a pleasant singing voice in Frank Loesser's Tallahassee - it would, of course, have been a 'natural' to have seen Ladd teamed with frequent co-star Veronica Lake in something but the studio had let her go the year before. Worth a look but that's about all.

"Variety Girl", a film from 1947, showed up recently on cable. The film, which takes the theme of the Variety Club, which was a charitable organization involving well known movie people, is an excuse for showcasing the talent players employed by the studio. Paramount was at the time one of the most powerful places in which movies were made. As such, the idea behind this picture was to show how united and family-like the studio was.The story is paper thin. It presents an implausible situation about two young women trying to make it in the movie industry. They, like thousand other hopefuls, attracted by the glamour of Hollywood came to Los Angeles in droves to be discovered. This is exactly what Katherine Brown and Amber Lavonne try to do with amazing results.The fun in watching "Variety Girl" is recognizing stars, larger than life, being caught in the act of being themselves. Thus, we see the likes of Alan Ladd, Dorothy Lamour, Burt Lancaster, Lizabeth Scott, Barbara Stanwych, Gary Cooper, William Holden, William Bendix, and many others involved in either the show that takes the center of the story, or just around the studio, mixing with colleagues and extras.The funniest sequence involved Olga San Juan, who plays Amber, emoting to the high heavens just to be noticed by the many diners at the Brown Derby. Also the singing duo of Bing Crosby and Bob Hope in their rendition of Harmony.This is just an entertainment as conceived by the studio, no doubt. The best way to watch it is just to do so without expecting anything other than a smile. That way it will not disappoint.

... and that's as flimsy an excuse for a parade of stars as there ever was. This one seems more forced and artificial than such films normally do.Many of the stars have little or nothing to do in their cameos: Barbara Stanwyck, Burt Lancaster, Diana Lynn, and especially Robert Preston. Perhaps they're the lucky ones, given the limp nature of the script. They might have wound up like Spike Jones -- he and his City Slickers are far more obnoxious here than they were in "Thank Your Lucky Stars" (1943). Or the pitiable Alan Ladd, singing about that greatest of cities, Tallahassee, Florida. Seriously.The occasional bright spots include Paulette Goddard wearing soapsuds, and Ray Milland hiding his telephone in an overhead light fixture, à la "The Lost Weekend".I was also keen to see the rarely glimpsed, grey-haired Glenn Tryon, the male lead in 1928's magnificent "Lonesome", one of the final great achievements of the American silent film. "Lonesome" is comparable in some ways to King Vidor's "The Crowd", but is much less frequently discussed.I think few would argue if I were to say that "Variety Girl" is for completists only.Caveat emptor: This film's recent video release in the Bob Hope Collection has the George Pal Technicolor sequence in black and white.