This Year's Kiss

AMG Review of This Year's Kiss

William Ruhlmann
All Music Guide

Alice Faye was a movie star, not a recording star, but she sang in many film musicals of the 1930s and 1940s. This disc, drawn from motion picture soundtracks, presents 21 songs used in ten Faye films released between 1935 and 1938. She is given the opportunity to sing the songs of Irving Berlin, though it is usually the team of Harry Revel and Mack Gordon who provide the specially written material, which tends toward lively Depression fighters like "You Can't Have Everything." Faye's singing partners, who include Jack Haley and Shirley Temple, are not credited on the disc, which is short on annotations. Nevertheless, this is a fine collection as far as it goes, even though Faye went on working in musicals another seven years after the last song heard here.