Best movies like This Way Please

A film company hires a gangster to mock himself holding up a bank, but he succeeds too well and makes off with the money. But all ends well.

A young woman marries a soldier to fulfill the conditions of a will. However, when she gets ready to divorce him, she realizes that she actually loves him, and determines to find a way to keep him.

A Broadway producer is in a quandary when he discovers that the opening of his newest big production coincides with that of a major charity event. He despairs that the show will close after opening night until an ingenious writer suggests that he simply give the production snob-appeal by making the tickets nearly impossible to get by fabricating a story that they were all purchased by a flamboyant Texas oil baron who is totally besotted by the show's star.

A young man from a wealthy New York family pursues a career as the leader of a dance band.

A music-hall star and his best mate are conned out of their earnings (twice!) and left with nothing but a beloved greyhound.

Mary Gray elopes to Atlantic City, NJ, but begins having second thoughts about the marriage. Then she becomes inexplicably locked in her hotel room, and a series of cops, robbers and kidnappers passes through. Desperate, Mary trusts the shifty chambermaid Clara who whisks her away to the mansion of wealthy George Blaine. There, Mary must pretend to be a lowly cook, but that seems better than sticking with the guy she was engaged to.

Penny helps her idealistic architect father get his dream of a slum clearance project; The little miss dances with Corporal Jones.

Failing vaudeville performer, Len, is taken under the wing of the German Shepherd wonder dog, Kelly, and a new act is born. Len hopes all his dreams are coming true when he finds himself in Hollywood ... but Kelly is the one in demand on the big screen.

The Ritz Brothers pretend to be Kentucky hillbillies in order to get a booking on a radio show.

The president of a settlement-house group puts on a benefit variety show.

Promoter "Smoothie" King helps a pair of phonies con their way into a movie company. As Wanda heads toward stardom, she turns more and more from King toward the matinée idol. King must decide between his plans and her happiness.

This modest bit of comedy and romance in the adolescent vein is about a couple of spirited juveniles, Donald O'Connor and Gloria Jean, who carry on a flirtation parallel with that of their elders, Louise Allbritton and Ian Hunter.

A TV worker has fickle designs on an aspiring singer for whom she arranges an audition.

Lulu Monahan, the press agent for John Barrymore, is attempting to get a sponsor for a radio program. To that end, she and the agent for bandleader Kay Kyser, plant a story that the great Shakespearean actor, over his heartfelt objections, will teach Kyser how to play Shakespeare, which isn't the same as playing Paducah, which soon becomes evident.

Lovely Linda Mason has crooner Jim Hardy head over heels, but suave stepper Ted Hanover wants her for his new dance partner after fickle Lila Dixon gives him the brush. Jim's supper club, Holiday Inn, is the setting for the chase by Hanover and his manager.

A fictionalized account of the career of jazz singer Ruth Etting and her tempestuous marriage to gangster Marty Snyder, who helped propel her to stardom.

George Cabot Jr., the son of a department store owner, enrolls Kristina Nielsen, the store's sports clerk, at a university to use her as an advertisement for their fashion department. She falls for Larry Taylor, a teacher, and gets expelled.

This is a film about the life of Gus Edwards, a well known vaudeville composer, entertainer, and producer.

A struggling young singer falls for a nightclub owner whose father, a millionaire, is trying to shut it down.

The Weaver Brothers and Elviry have migrated from their usual hard-scrabble digs in the Ozarks and have taken up truck-farming.

A hard-boiled nightclub owner saves a beautiful young girl from drowning. He promptly falls in love with her, but she prefers a younger, more-genteel lover.

A film star finds herself in trouble with her co-star when she has to flirt with the backer to prevent him from withdrawing his support.

Gopher City Kansas hosts a beauty contest. The winner, Elvira Plunkett, and her mother go to Hollywood. The Chamber of Commerce also provides Elvira with an agent, Gopher City's own Elmer J. Butz. Elmer likes Elvira and the shy Elvira likes him, but Mrs. Plunkett, a formidable woman, has little use for hapless Elmer. On the train west, they meet movie star Larry Mitchell, who takes a shine to Elvira and helps her meet MGM directors once they get to Tinsel Town. Elmer, meanwhile, wants to help Elvira with her career and he also wants to be her man. Movie stardom does come to the Gopher City entourage, but to whom is a surprise. And who will win the lovely Elvira's hand?

Fly-by-night producers dodge bill collectors while trying for one big hit.

Ogden Spencer Trulow III is a wealthy kleptomaniac who turned to stealing when he was spurned by a girl. His psychoanalyst advises him to find another girl for a cure. He fastens his interest upon Sally Martin, who happens to be engaged upon helping some crooks steal a valuable necklace. Complications include two scantily attired individuals, one of them drunk, clinging to the cornice of a skyscraper and a large band of crooks in quest of the precious jewels.

Unscrupulous agent Rush Blake makes singing waiter Buddy Clayton a big radio star while Peggy Cornell, who has lost her own radio show, helps Buddy.

Jack Oakie and Jack Haley are songwriters are enroute from New York to Hollywood to make their fame and fortune; Ginger Rogers, a lunchwagon proprieter, joins them.

Down-on-his-luck film director Jimmie Dale takes a job at a fly-by-night acting school. He is drawn into the plans of the school's owner to bilk a wealthy young man out of the funds he has supplied to shoot a movie starring pretty student Alice Perkins. But Jimmie hopes to bilk the bilkers by actually completing the movie as ostensibly planned.

A husband-and-wife vaudeville team disguise their young son as a girl so he can enter a contest run by a movie studio that's looking for "a new Shirley Temple".

Joan Daley, a New York booking/press agent, attempts to recruit two local stand-ins, Jinx Terry and Lois Morgan, when the Cuban sister-act, Marianela and Rosita she as booked into the nightclub for which she works fails to materialize. Complications arrive when the real Cuban sisters show up.

The brash, opinionated owner of a nightclub manages to drive everybody crazy on a boat trip to Havana.

In this amiable Columbia B musical, society girl Ann Miller escapes her Back Bay family by performing in the chorus line in a burlesque house. But trouble starts when her boss (William Wright) decides to build her up as a star. One of the many bread-and-butter Columbia productions graced by the contributions of Cole’s in-house dance studio. Cole dances behind Miller in “I’m Gonna See My Baby.” --Museum of Modern Art

An aspiring singer and her lover, a songwriter who has desperately resorted to writing radio jingles, have many conflicts on their road to success...

Caroline Bird, the crotchety and stingy owner of Bird Milk Products, is not amused when her employees at the Dairyville factory, the oldest plant in the company, broadcast a special radio program in honor of her birthday. Employees Lulubelle, Scotty and Vera Vague, fed up with the terrible working conditions at Dairyville, cut into the broadcast, and Lulubelle asserts that Caroline is a "big hunk of cheese." Lane, the factory manager, cannot find the culprit, and so Caroline goes with her secretary, Dale Evans, to Dairyville.

Socially prominent Michael Ashburn, chief assistant for a London loan broker makes a large loan during a closing time to a man for a pair of earrings. He is unaware that the collateral can not be removed from the ears in which they reside, so then Julie becomes part of the collateral.

The film concerns a family vaudeville troupe headed by patriarch Pete Monahan. Because of his love affair with the bottle, Pete manages to get himself and his family blacklisted from every major vaude house in the country. Though Pete's kids Jimmy and Patsy love their dad, they're forced to break away from the act and go off on their own to survive. Eventually, the whole gang is reunited in a shamelessly lachrymose musical finale.

Starving playwright Judith Wells meets playboy writer of musicals, George Macrae, over a plate of stolen spaghetti. He persuades producer Sam Gordon to buy her ridiculous play "North Winds" just to improve his romantic chances, and even persuades her to sing in the sort of show she pretends to despise. But just when their romance is going well, Gordon's former flame Lulu reveals the ace up her sleeve...

A secretary catches the eye of her amorous boss while her regular boyfriend keeps trying to propose marriage to her.

Ex-vaudeville performer Trixie makes a come-back, and threatens to thwart the ambitions of her song-writing step-children, Bob and Judy.

In his last film assignment, portly Walter Connolly fills the title role (in more ways than one) in The Great Victor Herbert. Very little of Herbert's life story is incorporated in the screenplay (a closing title actually apologizes for the film's paucity of cold hard facts); instead, the writers allow the famed composer's works to speak for themselves. In the tradition of one of his own operettas, Herbert spends most of his time patching up the shaky marriage between tenor John Ramsey (Allan Jones) and Louise Hall (Mary Martin). Many of Herbert's most famous compositions are well in evidence, including "Ah! Sweet Mystery of Life", "March of the Toys" and "Kiss Me Again", the latter performed con brio by teenaged coloratura Susanna Foster. Evidently, the producers were able to secure the film rights for the Herbert songs, but not for the stage productions in which they appeared, which may explain such bizarre interpolations as having a song from Naughty Marietta.

Sad-eyed, uniquely talented child actress Edith Fellows was Columbia's "answer" to Shirley Temple, Jane Withers and Deanna Durbin. In Little Miss Roughneck, Fellows is cast as Foxine LaRue, a tomboyish sort who is being prodded into a show-biz career by her stage mother Gert (Margaret Irving). Young Mr. Partridge (Scott Colton) becomes Foxine's agent, principally because he's sweet on the girl's older sister Mary (Jacqueline Wells). Blackballed from Hollywood because of her mother's pushiness, Foxine tries to help out Partridge and her own family by cooking up a bizarre publicity stunt, enlisting the aid of easy-going Mexican "papacita" Pascual (Leo Carrillo).

Bob Allen, a struggling songwriter poses as a millionaire cowboy to win Broadway star Babs Lee.

Eleven Gilbert & Sullivan numbers are melded within the murder-mystery plot of "Girl on the Spot", with a result that either G&S and/or the plot are always seemingly on stage-wait or in the wings awaiting a cue. Lois Collier is the girl-on-the-spot of the title because she was on the scene of a murder. The police conclude she didn't do it and they use her to set a trap for the real killer, a G&S addict, by financing a Broadway production starring Collier.

A poor country girl from Vermont travels to New York City to attend a theatrical school.

A romance between a struggling composer and an American singer.

Soldier Johnny Grey is engaged to marry singer Mapy Cortes, but his plans go awry when he learns that he is the heir to $100,000 from his great-grandfather -- a bequest that comes with a catch: before claiming the money, Johnny must marry a descendant of his great-grandfather's Civil War enemy, General Havelock-Allen. Not wanting to disrupt his planned marriage to Mapy, Johnny must figure out how to concoct a temporary marriage-of-convenience with the descendant -- who turns out to be the beautiful Terry Havelock-Allen.

Nancy Willows (Constance Towers), pretty blonde high school teacher, writes song lyrics which spark the careers of struggling young pianist-composer Martin Adams (Keefe Brasselle')and would-be singer Jerry Dennis (Frankie Laine). When Nancy and Martin fall in love but quarrel over her old flame, David Parker (William Leslie), Nancy returns to her teaching job. Jerry reunites Nancy and Martin and, in turn, succumbs to the charms of his new secretary Marge Stevenson (Lucy Marlow).

In this romantic comedy, three man-hungry sisters consult a fortune-teller to help them with their romantic futures.

Broadway dancing star Adele Dorey who, overworked and exhausted, suddenly ups and leaves New York in favor of a country village. But when promoter Bobby Lewis (Egan) of the barnstorming Gay Girlies Burlesque Company arrives in town, he picks an incognito Adele among all the pretty village girls to star in his new show. On a lark, Adele introduces her maid Jane (Louise Fazenda) as her mother and accepts a contract. When Adele's identity is finally revealed, the slumming star apologizes for her deception by offering Bobby a Broadway job.

Director Ted Brooks and comedians Jack Norcross, Dandy Joslyn and Phil Miller are part of a troupe of promising young players rehearsing for a WPA show at the Garrick Theater in New York and are stunned when the government withdraws their funding on the day of the show's dress rehearsal. Destitute, the troupe plans to return home when Mac, the stage doorman, offers to allow four of the men, Phil, Dandy, Jack and Ted, to use the theater for a boardinghouse. After accepting Mac's offer, the men improvise bedrooms out of the set pieces and meet amateur actress Lorie Fenton from Cleveland, who is eager to audition for them. When the men learn she recently received a small inheritance, they allow her to audition, hoping she will back the show.