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Almost forgotten today -- and eclipsed in many peoples' minds by the Clifton Webb film of the same name from 1948 -- Sitting Pretty is a lively little comedy inspired by the music business of the early 1930s. Jack Oakie is at his brashest as the over-confident composer Chick Parker, whose treatment of his more innocent lyricist partner Pete Pendleton (Jack Haley), by modern standards, goes just over the line to plain abuse. But Oakie pulls it off without wholly losing the audience's sympathy, mostly because the two are so good at what they do -- and because director Harry Joe Brown (who was mostly known for his westerns) moves the action along so briskly that no one can dwell too long on any part of this script. Indeed, the whole script is highly episodic and filled with holes, but Brown and company make us forget those gaps in logic and plot. Oakie and Haley make an enjoyable team, Ginger Rogers is charmingly fresh-faced as the ingenue who nearly comes between them -- despite not quite enough to do -- and Jerry Tucker is a treat as her nasty-tempered younger brother. And then there's Thelma Todd, who comes on-screen like a whirlwind and never lets up, a funny, vampy, trampy over-the-top leading lady with too much libido and not enough clothes. She dominates every scene she's in and her whole section of the movie, but she's so good at what she does that one never really minds the fact that her part of the film feels like its in a separate production. In the end, Sitting Pretty isn't a lost classic, or remotely the best movie ever made about its subject -- much less the best musical about musicals of 1933 -- but it is a lot of fun while the ride lasts, despite a bump or two over those gaps. Incidentally, the characters played by Oakie and Haley were loosely based on Paramount's real-life songwriting team Mack Gordon and Harry Revel, who show up in bit parts. And Sitting Pretty is also the film that introduced the sprightly tune "Did You Ever See a Dream Walking?" which later became the basis for a superb Popeye cartoon entitled A Dream Walking (1934) -- and in its hit rendition by Bing Crosby, turned up in pictures as late as 1985 (in A Nightmare On Elm Street 2!).