Word: kidded
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...Singing Kid" Al Jolson gives another singularly uninteresting performance. Jolson's line is extremely limited and for this reviewer, at least, his appeal has utterly worn out. He is a past master at the art of letting his supporting cast take the picture out from under his nose, as Edward Everett Horton, the Yacht Club Boys, and most of all, Cab Calloway and his band, do in this picture. If the Cab and his band had had more of a part the whole thing might have been worth seeing. As it is he appears only a few short times...
Immature though his sense of generality may be, Playwright Shaw displays an easy, forceful style of writing. Says one of his live soldiers to another: "Kids shouldn't be dead, Charley. That's what they musta figured when the dirt started fallin' in on 'em. . . . Did they want to be standin' there when the lead poured in? They wanted to be home readin' a book or teachin' their kid c-a-t spells cat or takin' a woman out into the country in an open car with the wind blowin...
...Singing Kid (Warner). Cinemaddicts for whom Warner Brothers musicals have hitherto been trademarked by the presence of Ruby Keeler, Joan Blondell, Guy Kibbee and Frank McHugh, may well rub their eyes to discover herein such novelties as Negro Bandmaster Cab Calloway, the Yacht Club Boys, a British-sounding ingenue named Beverly Roberts and a 6-year-old moppet called Sybil Jason, imported from Capetown by way of London. Among child actresses, Sybil Jason is to Shirley Temple as Jean Harlow is to Ann Harding: less whole some but more refreshing. She made her stage debut at 3. doing imitations...
Unfortunately, even a galaxy of new talent plus Actress Keeler's husband, Al Jolson, cannot entirely disguise the fact that, aside from its personnel. The Singing Kid sticks with alarming fidelity to the tradition of its predecessors. Its story runs to formula. A song & dance man (Jolson) loses girl, money, voice, regains the latter two under the impetus of fresh romance. Production numbers, with the exception of one in which the Yacht Club Boys heckle Jolson for his Mammy songs, have a warmed-over air. As entertainment, it boils down to a simple question of taste: Is Jolson...
That's what makes it so hard to understand in "The Singing Kid" why she runs away with his lawyer leaving Al to face the T Men from the Internal Revenue Department. But Claire Dodd, who once again is the unfaithful, deceitful woman does just that with Lyle Talbot, who is cast in the unfamiliar role of the unpleasant attorney...