Varieties on Parade


Varieties on Parade is a 1951 American musical film directed by Ron Ormond and released by Lippert Pictures.

Content

The film is a simple variety hour with no plot, replicating a vaudeville show. Comic master of ceremonies Eddie Garr opens the show with a monologue about Hollywood locals trying to impress movie producers. He then introduces a lineup of dancers, harmonica players, a dog act, a comic adagio act, acrobats, jugglers, and cyclists. Guest stars are spotted between the acts: Jackie Coogan lampoons his 1921 breakthrough role as "The Kid," with Eddie Garr imitating Charlie Chaplin; Eddie Dean offers a cowboy song and engages Garr and Coogan in comic patter; Tom Neal and Iris Adrian, both featured in Lippert productions, do a flirtation act; and Lyle Talbot appears in a sketch with burlesque veterans Jean Carroll and Harry Rose.

Cast

In 1948, during the dawn of commercial television, many of its programs depended on live entertainment, relying on specialty acts from vaudeville. This exposure created new interest in vaudeville performers and variety shows.
Beginning in 1949, former vaudeville dancing star June Carr and her husband, producer-director Ron Ormond, made a series of vaudeville-based musical features on $10,000 budgets, a remarkably low figure for a mainstream Hollywood feature. "I got all the acts I knew from my years on the road," Carr later explained. Typically "we shot with three cameras in a downtown Los Angeles theater... the crew was going to quit at five, and we couldn't afford to keep them around ."