Girls' Town (DVD)

Sexy swimsuit contest winner Myra Norman is rewarded with a trip to Hollywood for a screen test. Tagging along is her mousey sister, Sue. When the screen test turns out to be a scam, the siblings move into "Girls' Town", a boarding house for struggling actresses. Myra is now just one of the many shapely young women lined up for casting calls. She is shocked when it is Sue, not her, that catches a part in a major motion picture and the eye of a handsome talent agent. Overcome with jealousy, the former bathing beauty vows to sabotage her sister's newfound career.

Girls' Town was the last film for Victor Halperin, best known as the director of the 1932 horror classic White Zombie. Despite the fact that he lived another 40 years (he died in 1983), Halperin never made another movie. Much of the plot of centers around a casting call for his earlier film Nation Aflame (1937). The adorable Edith Fellows usually played orphans and otherwise deprived young girls, most notably in Pennies from Heaven (1936) with Bing Crosby. Vince Barnett provided welcome comic relief in dozens of films in the 1930s and 1940s. His highest-profile role during that era was as Tony Camonte's inept "secretary" in Howard Hawks' Scarface (1932).

• drama