(2 of 2)
Sweet Rosie O'Grady (20th Century-Fox) sumptuously swaggers into Manhattan's Technicolored past (circa 1880) in which Miss Grable plays a music-hall queen from London named Madeleine Marlowe. Madeleine's betrothal to a Duke (Reginald Gardner) is mucked up by cover articles in the Police Gazette which unmask her as the onetime toast of Brooklyn Burlesque, Rosie O'Grady. Rosie wreaks vengeance upon Police Gazette Journalist Sam McGee (Robert Young) by telling the rest of the press that he has wooed her for her fortune. She gets him fired. Journalist McGee gallantly retaliates by popularizing the Sweet Rosie O'Grady song and by publishing an account of their mythical affair. Soon they are really in love.
Meanwhile decorators and Technicolorists indulge in rich reproductions of Delmonico's restaurant, the Hotel Brevoort, Barney's, a beer garden. There is also much dancing, and singing of such deathless ditties as Rosie, Waiting at the Church, Two Little Girls in Blue, plus the new catchy Goin' to the County Fair and the sure-fire My Heart Tells Me (which Miss Grable, enjoying her first bath on the screen, sings from a tall wooden bathtub—see cut).
Robert Young's limp sideburns evoke the period as sharply as the best of the sets. Adolphe Menjou and Reginald Gardner are atmospheric. The fact that Cinemactress Grable's histrionic legs are here shrouded in fancy skirts may sadden her admirers. But she makes up for that in one high-stepping number which has something of the shock value that might result from watching grandma, in the bloom of her youth, chuck an old rip under the chin with the toe-point of her slipper.