The Sunday Round-Up (Warner Bros., The Vitaphone Corporation, 1936)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

In between last night’s (Saturday, September 6) two Turner Classic Movies features, my husband Charles and I caught an engaging 20-minute 1936 short from Warner Bros. and the Vitaphone Corporation (“Vitaphone” had been the trade name for the original sound-on-disc system with which Warner Bros. had shot The Jazz Singer and its other early sound features and music shorts; after they abandoned Vitaphone and went to sound-on-film like everybody else, they kept the “Vitaphone” name as a trademark for their musical shorts) called The Sunday Round-Up. It was a vest-pocket musical directed by William Clemens and starring Dick Foran as a parson who’s having trouble getting the citizens of an Old West frontier town to his church because they’d rather hang out at the Mustang Saloon for less salubrious entertainments. The opening scene shows the Mustang’s proprietor, Jack Higgins (Edmund Cobb), worried because they’ve lost the baritone for their barbershop quartet. Exactly what happened to him isn’t clear, but we get the impression he was either arrested or killed. The young Jane Wyman is in the film, and at first I assumed she was playing Dick Foran’s wife until the imdb.com cast list identified her character as “Belle Soule,” who sings at the Mustang Club and does a ribald number (as ribald as they could get away with under the Production Code) called “The Soubrette on the Police Gazette.” Pastor Ted Burke (Foran) hits on the idea of doing a variety show at the church the next Sunday so they’ll draw the crowd away from the Mustang. They recruit an out-of-work vaudeville couple named Mr. and Mrs. Chase (Fritz and Jean Hubert) to appear, but the Chases get too scared of the audience and do their routine in the empty Mustang Club set instead. They do get a knife thrower (Steve Clemente), and in the absence of the Chases Pastor Burke gets up and sings a suitably “inspirational” song called “The Open Road” with a gospel chorus, and predictably Foran’s voice (considerably better than it sounded six years later when it inexplicably introduced the song “I’ll Remember April” in the Abbott and Costello vehicle Ride ’Em, Cowboy when it would have been a perfect vehicle for “sepia songstress” Ella Fitzgerald, who was in the movie and got that weirdly patronizing billing in the trailer) so impresses Jack that he asks Burke to become the baritone in their quartet. It’s not that great a movie, but it is fun, and like The Paleface it’s a souvenir of the days when color films were actually colorful and weren’t restricted to the palette of dirty greens and browns that dominate all too many “color” films today!