Review

  • It doesn't matter a great deal since "Hello, Frisco, Hello" doesn't purport to be historically accurate, but I found it odd that a number of the film's songs are anachronisms. A few, particularly "You'll Never Know," were written for the movie, but the others are a melange of songs from the past, except a past that came after the film's setting, which is, roughly speaking, San Francisco in the middle of the nineteenth century. Yet Alice Faye sings "Ragtime Cowboy Joe", which wasn't written until 1912. Of course, the same thing happens in other movies. Many of the songs in "Singin' in the Rain" were written in the sound era but show up in the film during the silent era. But I can't be hard on the movie which introduced the beautiful "You'll Never Know" and allows its star to sing it more than once.