Ted Lewis

Two bumbling service station attendants are left as the sole beneficiaries in a gangster's will. Their trip to claim their fortune is sidetracked when they are stranded in a haunted house along with several other strangers.

During World War II, all the studios put out "all-star" vehicles which featured virtually every star on the lot--often playing themselves--in musical numbers and comedy skits, and were meant as morale-boosters to both the troops overseas and the civilians at home. This was Universal Pictures' effort. It features everyone from Donald O'Connor to the Andrews Sisters to Orson Welles to W.C. Fields to George Raft to Marlene Dietrich, and dozens of other Universal players.

In this musical comedy, a crooked record producer uses his mob connections to force performers to do their stuff. The trouble really begins when the gangster's strong-arm tactics nearly cause a singer to lose his fiancée. A wide variety of entertainers appear including cowboy crooner Gene Autry, baseball hero Joe DiMaggio, and big band stars Cab Calloway, Ted Lewis, and the Kay Thompson Singers. Songs include "Mamma I Wanna Make Rhythm," "Manhattan Merry-Go-Round," "Heaven?," "I Owe You," and "It's Round-up Time in Reno."

In this musical, a songwriter goes to court to claim the rights to his song that was stolen by an unscrupulous music publisher. He brings his girlfriend with him. Also going to court are the Jubilee singers, hillbillies, and some cowboys and Indians who demonstrate that the composer wrote his song by rearranging four folk tunes. He wins his song back and $50,000 in damages. Songs include: "Heading Home," "Roll Along Prairie Moon," "Tender Is the Night," "You're My Thrill," "I'm Bound for Heaven," and "The Army Band."

Jeff grows up near Basin Street in New Orleans, playing his clarinet with the dock workers. He puts together a band, the Basin Street Hot-Shots, which includes a cornet player, Memphis. They struggle to get their jazz music accepted by the cafe society of the city. Betty Lou joins their band as a singer and gets Louie to show her how to do scat singing. Memphis and Jeff both fall in love with Betty Lou.

Now hear this. The studio that gave the cinema its voice offered 1929 audiences a chance to see and hear multiple silent-screen favorites for the first time in a gaudy, grandiose music-comedy-novelty revue that also included Talkie stars, Broadway luminaries and of course, Rin-Tin-Tin. Frank Fay hosts a jamboree that, among its 70+ stars, features bicyclers, boxing champ Georges Carpentier, chorines in terpsichore kickery, sister acts, Myrna Loy in two-strip Technicolor as an exotic Far East beauty, John Barrymore in a Shakespearean soliloquy (adding an on-screen voice to his legendary profile for the first time) and Winnie Lightner famously warbling the joys of Singing in the Bathtub. Watch, rinse, repeat!

Marjorie Travers has vanished in Chinatown and and her older sister Gloria appeals to the Mayor for help. But the the Mayor has assigned Commissioner Deering to investigate her disappearance not knowing that Deering is head of the underworld.

It is the story of Ted Lewis, popular band leader and clarinettist. The music for the film was written by Harry Akst and Grant Clarke, except for "St. Louis Blues" by W. C. Handy and "Tiger Rag". The film's title comes from Lewis's catchphrase "Is everybody happy?" The film's soundtrack exists on Vitaphone discs preserved at the UCLA Film and Television Archive, but the film itself is considered a lost film, according to the Vitaphone Project website. A five minute clip from the film can be found on YouTube.

This is the story of Ted Lewis, popular band leader and clarinettist.

This 1941 Universal short is not the same film as the 1943 Columbia feature film/bio, although both films starred Ted Lewis and had the same title. This short, in addition to Lewis and his band and performers such as Charles 'Snowball' Whittier and Jeanne Blanche, who were part of the Lewis troupe for years, also featured the Four Leahn Sisters, and the adagio trio of Jay, Kay and Katye.