This film has a singularly appropriate title because the larceny is equal to the music in this very short B musical from Universal. There's also equal parts of comedy and chicanery here as well.
Leo Carrillo is a former bootlegger who's now a respectable hotel and nightclub owner and running up really respectable debts in both. He even considers an arson fire on a house he owns in Rochester, but girl Friday Lee Patrick reminds him he hasn't paid his fire insurance premiums.
Agent William Frawley knows about Carrillo's money troubles and hatches a scheme that will get his clients the Alvino Rey Orchestra with the King Sisters and singer Allan Jones all employed. Frawley hires out of work ham actor Gus Schilling to impersonate a lawyer and visit Carrillo on the pretext that he's looking for Allan Jones who was left a quarter of a million dollars by his uncle in Argentina. That gets Carrillo's attention as he goes to hear Jones and Carrillo with great fanfare has announced the most incredible singing discovery since Frank Sinatra.
Carrillo does have a problem though and that's the contract he has with his current attraction Kitty Carlisle. She doesn't take kindly to being shoved aside and smells a rat. And the rat in this particular case is Schilling who starts blackmailing Frawley over this con he's pulled off.
With some better production values and musical score Larceny With Music could have been a classic. One hit song would have made this film. As it is it's got a stellar cast and a wacky plot that really keeps the film moving.
Hopefully TCM will broadcast this one, it's a comic gem in the rough.
