This is a pleasant enough diversion which pokes gentle fun at the search for an 'unknown' to play the eponymous role in a film adaptation of a best selling novel. Someone actually gave this more than the customary ten seconds thought because it was released in 1939, the same year as Gone With The Wind, a film that had hogged headlines around the world via its search for the perfect heroine, Scarlett O'Hara; Scarlett was a Southern belle and in Second Fiddle the fictitious novel is The Girl From The North, the North carries connotations of snow and Sonja Henie came from a Northern country, Norway and was herself associated with both snow and ice and as if that were not enough, in Second Fiddle she is a resident of Bergen, Minnesota and Bergen is also, of course, an island off the coast of Norway. So, was it worth all this care. More or less. Publicist Tyrone Power is sent to bring Henie to Hollywood and naturally he falls in love with her but his job obliges him to engineer a 'romance' between Henie and Rudy Vallee, another studio 'property' in need of publicity; we now have a touch of the Cyrano's as Power is not only buying the flowers and candy that Henie thinks is coming from Vallee but is also writing the billed-doux and even goes so far as to compose a ballad, I Poured My Heart Into A Song, ostensibly written by Vallee. Edna May Oliver is also on hand to lob the odd droll asides into the mix and it all ends happily. A diverting 80 minutes or so.
Review of Second Fiddle
