Alice Faye Is More Popular Than Betty Grable?

Fox released a Betty Grable collection on DVD, and it didn't do well enough for them to release a second set (so far), but they have announced The Alice Faye Collection, Volume 2, with "Hollywood Cavalcade," "Rose of Washington Square" (aka "Please Don't Sue Us, Fanny Brice"), "The Great American Broadcast," "Hello, Frisco, Hello," and the USO tribute "Four Jills in a Jeep" (which doesn't actually star Faye; she and Grable and other Fox stars appear as themselves).

If the Faye collection sold better than the Grable collection, as this seems to indicate (though it may be that the films in this collection, being mostly black-and-white, are cheaper to remaster than Grable's mostly Technicolor movies), it surprises me; neither is among my favorite musical stars of the period but I'd always assumed that Grable was better-known. Apparently not.

Speaking of Fox musicals with Alice Faye, the best of the lot, Busby Berkeley's The Gang's All Here, received a transfer with incorrect colors last time around; Fox is releasing a "remastered," and hopefully corrected, version with the same extras, either individually or as part of a Carmen Miranda Collection -- which, except for Gang, is really more of a Vivian Blaine collection, since she's in most of those movies.

Every studio in the Golden Age of Movie Musicals (tm) had its strengths and weaknesses. Fox's strengths included photography (especially in Technicolor, of course), musical direction (Alfred Newman's arrangements could be overdone at times, but they were a lot more tasteful than the garish, generically loud work of the MGM department) and comedy relief players like Phil Silvers (who also helped out some musicals at Columbia). I think their front-line talent, like Faye and Grable, was not nearly as strong as the other studios'; their top musical stars are a lot more limited than anybody else's.

Update: It occurred to me that if Faye is indeed more popular than Grable, it might be evidence that movie-musical performers with one outstanding talent hold up better than performers who are good but not great at everything. Faye wasn't very strong as an actor, wasn't really a dancer, but she did have a genuinely outstanding singing voice. Grable was a valuable performer because she could supply all four things you look for in movie musicals: singing, dancing, acting, and looks. But she wasn't great at any of those things, she was good, not great. I think you could argue that a performer who is outstanding at one or two things but weak at other things will inspire more interest years down the road than someone who is good but not outstanding at everything, even though the latter performer is probably more valuable to the studio at the time.