Huievest Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

ChicDragon It's a mild crowd pleaser for people who are exhausted by blockbusters.

Janae Milner Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

Tyreece Hulme One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.

Alex da Silva We have a musical that starts well but then fades until you are finally glad that it has come to an end. The cast are fine when it comes to singing and dancing especially in the first half of the film – some great songs and sequences. However, the lead character as played by George Murphy isn't nice to his girlfriend Nancy Kelly from the start and so the audience aren't really on his side from the beginning. In fact, none of the relationships make sense – his other alliance with Constance Moore is totally confusing. She divorces him, then wants him back – it never makes sense. The film suffers because it chooses to follow this unrealistic love triangle story that would just never be there. Eddie Cantor and Joan Davis provide the comedy partnership and deliver their lines well, but you have to be a Cantor fan to enjoy his schtick.There are moments of humour and good songs but why perform "It Had to Be You" three times? It was good on the first occasion but then becomes corny. The film gets boring, I'm sad to say.

xredgarnetx SHOW BUSINESS (what an imaginative title) is a look back at the heyday of vaudeville, with nods to its antecedent, burlesque. When this was made in 1944, vaudeville wasn't that long gone, so I suspect a lot of the original audience must have found the movie a strong nostalgia pull. Eddie Cantor and George Murphy play two vaudevillians hooked up with a pair of female vaudevillians played by Joan Davis and Constance Moore. They perform classic number after classic number in a virtually plot-free movie. Cantor of course is marvelous, if a little long in the tooth for the role. Murphy and Davis, both pretty young at the time, hold their own. Only Moore seems out of place, although she does her best. Musical numbers\include "It Had to Be You" and the Al Jolson classic, "Dinah." A blackface number comes as a shock to these 21st century eyes, but what are you gonna do? Cut it out? I am sure it was in years past, but the number is integral to the proceedings and entertaining without being overtly offensive. It reminds the viewer of vaudeville's deepest roots, the minstrel shows of centuries past.

bkoganbing Any film that gets Eddie Cantor to revive Making Whoopee and I Don't Want To Get Well is one worth seeing even with the skimpy plot.Show Business is the story of a vaudeville act, how they got together and their trials and tribulations from the turn of the last century until the Twenties. It was right after talking pictures came in that vaudeville began slowly to decline.This was an era that Eddie Cantor knew well, it was the kind of Show Business he cut his performing teeth with before hitting the big time on Broadway in the Ziegfeld Follies. The quartet is Cantor, George Murphy, Constance Moore, and Joan Davis.Davis chases Cantor through out the film which is ironic because she got him in the real life. It was on this film that they had a discreet affair that was well known in performing circles, but the public never found out about lest Cantor's family image be ruined. Davis's comedy here and elsewhere was the physical sort of stuff that Lucille Ball so popularized on television. Davis too had her biggest success in her television series I Married Joan. She died way too young.Murphy and Moore have an on, off, and on again romance with Nancy Kelly doing her best to break them up. Murphy's big number is the old standard It Had To Be You which at the time was enjoying a revival with a best selling duet record by Dick Haymes and Helen Forrest.No original music for Show Business, just some good old standards. Unfortunately there is a blackface number that all four of the leads are involved in. Cantor did blackface though it never was THE centerpiece of his stage persona like it was for rival Al Jolson.Show Business is a pleasant afternoon's diversion about the days of vaudeville. And what days they were.

ptb-8 This very funny and often very rude musical comedy is basically a biography of a burlesque to vaudeville song and dance team over the first 30 years of the 20th century. Produced in 1944 by RKO it forms part of the series of looser censorship titles that seemed to find some freedom to be more realistic (with a franker sexuality) during the war years. It is also part of the nostalgia mentality of WW2. SHOWBUSINESS is not a WW2 film but one made to shore up reasons why America fought, displaying a warm hearted Americana that justifies the American spirit - on stage in crummy burlesque and splashier vaudeville. The main stars are the unconvincing grinning George Murphy, always awkward and odd especially when tap dancing and the reliable and then retired 30s mega star Eddie Cantor who I personally find hilarious. Pratfall queen and camp comedienne Joan Davis becomes Edde's love interest: but... in this film Eddie's character is so clearly gay (the script makes no doubt he is both a sissy and not interested in a female lover that it is up to Joan to constantly turn to the camera and exclaim "but I just love that boy" chasing and embracing him while he squirms, even to the final fade out. One genuinely laugh out loud gag between them involves a massive salami...since she knows what Eddie likes. The dance numbers are pedestrian and just a blip above curiosity and there are so many montages using RKO musical stock footage that they almost take over the interest in the film, picking what obscure old title they have been lifted from. However, Joan and Eddie provide such a font of vulgar sex jokes and sly camp farce that they save the film from being bland. Oddly enough with all the vulgar jokes on hand, the Eddie Cantor song 'Makin Whoopee" is delivered in a slurred tone as if not to make such a big obvious deal of what 'makin whoopee' is actually referring to. A case of when the 1930 rendition is better than the 1944 one.