Bogie had been kicking around Hollywood since 1930, and made a name for himself playing escaped murderer Duke Mantee in The Petrified Forest (1936), reprising his stage role for the film version only at star Leslie Howard's insistence. Warner Bros. signed Bogart to appear in more films, usually playing gangsters and/or second fiddle to bigger Warner stars like James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson. The studio had little interest in building up Bogie; his biggest role of the period was the lead in Dead End (1937), a Samuel Goldwyn production for United Artists.

In Swing Your Lady, Bogie plays a manipulative wrestling manager-promoter, a kind of benign, distant relative of his Kid Galahad (1937) gangster character. But he's really just along for the ride: Swing Your Lady, predominantly, is a hillbilly musical comedy.

For most, the very idea of Bogie appearing in such a movie is so ludicrous as to disqualify it from any serious discussion. But on its own terms, Swing Your Lady succeeds reasonably well achieving what it sets out to do. As hillbilly musical comedies go, this one ain't bad, nor is Bogie's performance therein.

Warner Archive's manufactured-on-demand DVD is fairly good, and includes an interesting trailer that makes clear for whom this picture was marketed.

Wrestling manager Ed (Bogart), accompanied by trainers Popeye (Frank McHugh) and Shiner (Allen Jenkins), is trying to drum up publicity for his wrestler, Joe Skopapolous (Nat Pendleton, a real-life former Olympic wrestler), by staging a big match in the Ozarks. The locals support the idea, but no suitable candidate can be found until Ed meets super-strong lady blacksmith Sadie Horn (Mack Sennett silent comedy star Louise Fazenda). She agrees to wrestle Joe for the $100 Ed promises her but later, after Joe accidentally meets Sadie while training and they immediately fall in love, he refuses to fight her.

However, Ed soon stumbles upon Sadie's other suitor, bearded mountain man Noah (Daniel Boone Savage, also a professional wrestler) and a match between Joe and Noah, each vying for Sadie's hand, is set.

The trailer accompanying Swing Your Lady is fascinating in that Bogie is barely glimpsed in it at all. Nor are Fazenda and Pendleton emphasized, and nor for that matter is Penny Singleton, who plays Ed's sprightly girlfriend. Instead, about 80% of the trailer is devoted to Vaudevillians known collectively as the Weaver Brothers & Elviry, a once enormously popular hillbilly act combining novelty musical instruments, comedy and song. Consisting mainly of Leon, Frank, and June Weaver (the latter stage-billed as "Elviry") they play local yokels and perform two big numbers in the film, "Dig Me a Grave in Missouri" and "The Old Apple Tree."

Other musical numbers feature Penny Singleton, who for this film changed her stage name from Dorothy McNulty, which she had used beginning with her first movie role in 1930. Here she gets to dance in the same, slightly wacky style that highlighted her cute work in Good News's (1930) best number, "The Varsity Drag." Swing Your Lady was the first of twelve (!) Penny Singleton movies released in 1938 alone. The last was Blondie, with Singleton playing Chic Young's comic strip heroine for the first of 28 enjoyable Columbia features. That and her voice work as Jane Jetson on The Jetsons became her signature roles, with actress and union activist (she was the first woman elected president of an AFL-CIO post) enjoying life to the ripe old age of 95.

The heart of Swing Your Lady, however, is the corny but sweet-natured romance between lunk-head wrestler Joe and plain-speaking lady blacksmith Sadie. Around this time Pendleton virtually always played similarly dim-witted types, often wrestlers or strongmen (as in At the Circus), dumbbell police detectives (Another Thin Man), or exasperated sergeants (Buck Privates). He's even more dense than usual in Swing Your Lady but his role is larger, and he's well-matched with Fazenda, a supremely talented silent comedienne not given a lot to work with in Swing Your Lady, but still charming.

Video & Audio

The black-and-white film is presented in original 1.37:1 format, and considering its age looks reasonably good despite some obvious damage and age-related wear here and there. The mono audio, English only with no subtitle or alternate audio options, is also okay. The disc is region-free. The lone Extra Feature is an original trailer, as mentioned above, focusing all its attentions on the Weaver Bros. and Elviry.

Parting Thoughts

Corny but hardly terrible, Swing Your Lady is a slightly above-average movie of its type, a hillbilly musical comedy. And though Humphrey Bogart might have been horribly embarrassed to appear in such a film, his performance is perfectly fine, just wildly out of place when viewed with the 20-20 vision hindsight offers. Recommended.

Stuart Galbraith IV is the Kyoto-based film historian and publisher-editor of World Cinema Paradise. His credits include film history books, DVD and Blu-ray audio commentaries and special features.