Somewhat Secret (MGM, 1939)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After A Modern Musketeer on June 14 Turner Classic Movies squeezed in a quite charming half-hour 1939 short called Somewhat Secret, directed by Sammy Lee (one of the relatively unimaginative dance directors hired by the studios en masse during the early sound era that lost their gigs when Busby Berkeley arrived) from a script by Richard English (“original” story), Julian Hochfelder, and Mort Greene (screenplay). It’s a satire on the attitude of 1930’s elders towards swing music, which they argue is corrupting the youth of America and undermining their morals. (That’s what older people have had to say about every sort of music young folks like, from 1920’s jazz to modern-day hip-hop. Indeed, when I read Bruno Walter’s autobiography Theme and Variations I was surprised to read that when he was growing up in Germany in the 1890’s there was a similar generation gap in musical tastes over Wagner, whom the young people liked and their parents couldn’t stand.) It takes place at the Dimsdale Hall Finishing School, where assistant dean Emily Godsall (Mary Howard) is giving a lecture telling the women students at Dimsdale that anyone caught listening to swing music will be disciplined for it. Emily is in love with the school’s chemistry professor, Benjamin Barnes (Tom Collins, who’s first shown wearing one of the most blatantly fake moustaches and beards in movie history, though eventually we learn why it’s so fake), who also doubles as the school’s music director and plays piano while Emily sings a sappy song called “You and I Were Made for Love.” Needless to say, the students, led by “Alice, the Tattletale” (Mary Bovard), have no intention of obeying Emily’s anti-swing edicts; they’ve already discovered an off-campus boîte called “Nick’s Nook” where a jukebox blasts away with swing, and they’re laying down plans to escape the campus and go to a major swing festival at the “Billion Dollar Pier” in Atlantic City. (There really was a big ballroom in Atlantic City called the Million Dollar Pier.)

Two gangster types lay in wait outside the Dimsdale campus one night; one of them (Billy Wayne) carries a violin case and we instantly assume it’s concealing a submachine gun, while the other (Benny Rubin) is armed with a pair of drumsticks and hammers away at any available surface. It turns out they aren’t crooks, though; they’re members of a major big band called the “Swingopators” and they’re at Dimsdale to kidnap their former pianist, Benny “Barrelhouse” Barnes, to reunite the Swingopators for the big Atlantic City gig. It turns out Barnes fled the band after an altercation in which he struck one of the band’s piccolo players and thought he had killed him, but when the two interlopers assure Barnes that the man survived and therefore he isn’t facing a murder rap, he agrees to rejoin. That means he blows off the engagement party at which Emily planned to announce that she and that nice young chemistry teacher (who’s shown in a sequence of him frantically pouring chemicals out of one container into another in a way that makes it look like he’s about to construct the Frankenstein Monster) are to be married. Emily traces Barnes to Nick’s Nook and then to Atlantic City, where to absolutely no one’s surprise she finds herself actually liking swing, tapping her feet to the music and then sort-of dancing to it. She realizes that the band’s pianist is her fiancé when a vandal draws a fake beard on the poster advertising him and she herself supplies the moustache and Harold Lloyd-style glasses he wore on campus at Dimsdale. Though I’m surprised the writers missed the gimmick of having Elsie sing a swing song herself at the finish, Somewhat Secret is still an imaginative little movie that at once acknowledges the clichés and plays fast and loose with them.