Hellzapoppin' (1941) on Netflix
Approved19411h 24mActionComedyMusical
Two stage comedians try to turn their revue into a movie and disrupt the adaptation. Composer Jeff Hunter wants to marry Kitty Rand, but her fiancé is his best friend.
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- Netflix3.7/5
- IMDb7.4/103,983 votes
- Rotten TomatoesNot available
Trailer
Plot summary
A musical pageant of chorus girls on a staircase collapses into a slide that carries them down to demons. Two stage comedians arrive by taxi in the middle of the mayhem and reveal that the setting is a movie soundstage. The director hounds them, saying their wild comedy will not work in movies. A screenwriter outlines his adaptation of their play, and the picture shows his proposed script: composer and theater producer Jeff Hunter wants to marry Kitty Rand but holds back because her fiancé, Woody Taylor, is his best friend. At the Rand estate the comedians carry props for the revue Jeff is staging for Kitty and set about disrupting it. Betty, the sister of one of them, pursues Pepi, the revue's leading man, while magician and detective Quimby keeps crossing their path.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Hellzapoppin' (1941)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Hellzapoppin was credited with a 1942 Academy Award nomination for Best Song for "Pig Foot Pete", but the song never appears in the film: it was performed in the Abbott and Costello comedy Keep 'Em Flying, another Universal Pictures release from 1941. The nomination lost to "White Christmas".
- Director H. C. Potter staged a finale in which Ole Olsen and Chic Johnson attend the opening of their film at Grauman's Chinese Theatre and sink into the wet cement of the celebrity courtyard like quicksand as the end title appears.
- Universal executives thought audiences might be confused by H. C. Potter's scenes, so with Potter gone from the lot producer Alex Gottlieb had director Eddie Cline shoot new scenes adding Shemp Howard as a fictitious projectionist, Jody Gilbert as his girlfriend, and Richard Lane and Elisha Cook Jr. Olsen and Johnson were absent for the retakes.
- The entire Broadway cast was initially slated to appear in the film, but the only stage performers who made it in were Ole Olsen and Chic Johnson, Katherine Johnson as the woman perpetually yelling for "Oscar", and the specialty act Whitey's Lindy Hoppers.
- MCA, Universal's television distributor, withdrew Hellzapoppin in 1968 after theatrical producer Alexander H. Cohen bought the rights from the Olsen & Johnson estate, and the studio's rental agency Universal/16 pulled all its 16mm prints from the library.
