Thanks a Million is a 1935 musical film produced and released by 20th Century Fox and directed by Roy Del Ruth. It stars Dick Powell, Ann Dvorak and Fred Allen, and features Patsy Kelly, David Rubinoff and Paul Whiteman and his band with singer/pianist Ramona. The script by Nunnally Johnson was based on a story by producer Darryl F. Zanuck and Melville Crossman and contained uncredited additional dialogue by Fred Allen, James Gow, Edmund Gross and Harry Tugend.

Thanks a Million was nominated for the Academy Award for Sound (E. H. Hansen) in 1935. It was remade in 1946 as If I'm Lucky, with Perry Como and Phil Silvers in the Dick Powell and Fred Allen roles.

Stranded in a small town in a downpour, the manager of a traveling musical show (Fred Allen) convinces the handlers of a boring long-winded local judge running for governor (Raymond Walburn) to hire his group to attract people to the politician's rallies. When the show's crooner, Eric Land (Dick Powell), upstages the Judge, he's fired, but on a return visit he saves the day by standing in for the Judge, who is too drunk to speak. Impressed by his poise, the party's bosses ask Eric to take over as candidate, and the singer, knowing he has no chance to win, agrees for the exposure and the radio airtime in which he can showcase his singing. Soon, though, his girlfriend Sally (Ann Dvorak) becomes annoyed at the amount of time Eric is spending with the wife of one of the bosses, and she leaves when she thinks he has lied to her. When the bosses ask Eric to agree to patronage appointments that will lead to easy graft for all of them, he exposes them on the radio, telling the voters that voting for him would be a huge mistake and urging them to vote for his opponent. At the end Eric is, of course, elected governor, and re-united with Sally.

Louis Armstrong (August 4, 1901 – July 6, 1971), nicknamed Satchmo or Pops, was an American jazz trumpeter and singer from New Orleans, Louisiana.

Coming to prominence in the 1920s as an "inventive" cornet and trumpet player, Armstrong was a foundational influence in jazz, shifting the music's focus from collective improvisation to solo performance. With his instantly recognizable deep and distinctive gravelly voice, Armstrong was also an influential singer, demonstrating great dexterity as an improviser, bending the lyrics and melody of a song for expressive purposes. He was also greatly skilled at scat singing (vocalizing using sounds and syllables instead of actual lyrics).

Renowned for his charismatic stage presence and voice almost as much as for his trumpet-playing, Armstrong's influence extends well beyond jazz music, and by the end of his career in the 1960s, he was widely regarded as a profound influence on popular music in general. Armstrong was one of the first truly popular African-American entertainers to "cross over," whose skin-color was secondary to his music in an America that was severely racially divided. It allowed him socially acceptable access to the upper echelons of American society that were highly restricted for a black man. While he rarely publicly politicized his race, often to the dismay of fellow African-Americans, he was privately a strong supporter of the Civil Rights movement in America.^{[citation needed]}