With Love and Kisses

It's apparent someone thought that Pinky Tomlin, the singer-songwriter, was tailor-made for countrified musicals, but this Poverty Row effort, while it may have played encouragingly in the rural States Right circuit at the time, certainly hasn't aged well. Pinky is an aspiring songwriter in Arkansas, who tunes into Richmond Kane's radio program to see if he's going to sing Tomlin's song. He does, but claims he wrote it himself. Pinky takes the train to New York and confronts Kane, gets thrown into jail twice, meets Arthur Housman there (doing his drunk act), who's the brother of co-star Toby Wing. Through various ill-defined plot devices, Pinky winds up writing songs for the Mob in New York in an apartment with a cow, until the whole thing is settled out at the end.

The songs, co-written by Tomlin, are all right, although like the rest of his catalogue, have not aged well. Director Leslie Goodwins was a competent director of series comedy shorts and later tv comedy (he ended his career directing series like GILLIGAN'S ISLAND and F TROOP, but his feature work never got above the B ranks, and even though he worked a lot for RKO, it was often for the Mexican Spitfire series.

This movie calls for some major comedy players with big reactions, and, alas, it never gets any better than Mr. Housman, who does some nice work, both in drunk and sober mode, but it isn't enough. Mr. Tomlin was left with a mild, pleasant personality, a good voice, and a Southern twang in his voice. It was enough for a minor career in entertainment, but not enough to sustain a career in the movies -- or even this movie.