Swing Your Lady

Swing Your Lady with Humphrey Bogart.  Humphrey Bogart plays a wrestling manager/promoter touring the country with Joe 'Hercules' Skopapolous, setting up local matches to build up a reputation for Joe.  He finds himself in the Ozarks unable to find a suitable local challenger and ends up scheduling a match with a lady blacksmith.

This movie has all the nice little tidbits of Zeitgeist that I look for in the MCMXXXVIII movies.  This was a movie version of a popular Broadway play of the same name and apparently played on the popularity of 'hillbilly' humor at the time.  It stars a group known as "The Weaver Brothers and Elviry" who were a popular vaudeville hillbilly act and who starred in a whole series of movies for Republic Pictures after this film.  Joe Skopapolus was played by actor Nat Pendleton who was a former Olympic and pro wrestler.  One of his opponents in this movie was played by Daniel Boone 'Whiskers' Savage, a real professional wrestler who was in no other movies.  The big wrestling match in this movie was scheduled for Decoration Day, which we would call Memorial Day.

Familiar faces: Allen Jenkins and Penny Singleton (who sings and dances).  Also a small appearance by Ronald Reagan.

Humphrey Bogart and Ronald Reagan