Happy Feet Friday (sleuthing edition)

One of my favorite screwball comedies is the 1945 Warner Bros film, The Horn Blows at Midnight, starring Jack Benny and Alexis Smith, with a host of wonderful supporting actors (including the incredibly beautiful Dolores Moran). Jack plays an angel whose assignment is to travel to earth in order to sound the trump of doom, but he manages to bungle the job and is trapped here while the higher powers figure out what to do.

There's a scene in the movie where Jack has landed a tryout for a gig with a swing band - Slippy Tompkins and his Twelve Hep Cats - and he's being escorted to the bandstand by the dance hall manager. While they're chatting, the band - ostensibly Slippy and the boys, but in reality that fabulous Warner Bros studio orchestra of the 1940s - is playing an extremely catchy swing number, with young people jitterbugging like mad. The tune struck me as being a big cut above mere incidental music that would have been written for a half minute for one scene in this particular movie, and I assumed it must have been the instrumental version of a pop song which I had somehow never come across. The tune runs from the opening of the following video until about the 35-second mark:



I initially thought this might be something from the writing team of Warren and Mercer, but an extensive search through their songbook didn't turn it up. I began to check out Warner Bros movies on YouTube from time to time - and last weekend I hit pay-dirt.

The song is called "Ice Cold Katie", and it's the centerpiece for a big musical number in the 1943 Warner Bros film, Thank Your Lucky Stars. The scene features an all-black cast, including Hattie McDaniel and Willie Best, and tells the story of a soldier who is wooing a beautiful, but haughty, young woman and trying to get her to marry him before he's shipped overseas. The song was written by Frank Loesser and Arthur Schwartz. And here it is:



So, mystery solved.