The Spectacle Maker is noteworthy for two things besides the pretty color: (1) It was the first directorial effort of Australian transplant John Villiers Farrow, who would go on to marry Maureen O’Sullivan, direct such movies as Five Came Back, Wake Island, The Big Clock, Alias Nick Beal and Hondo, and father an actress daughter named Mia and (2) the title role was played by Christian Rub, who would gain immortality as the voice and physical model for Gepetto in Walt Disney’s Pinocchio (his appearance in this short may in fact have gotten him the job). Music is limited to some maypole dances and a simple ditty sung by little Cora Sue Collins as a princess. The Spectacle Maker (1934), for one, is a fairy tale parable about a maker of magic lenses one makes people see only beauty, which makes him famous and beloved, while another makes them see only the truth, which gets him condemned for witchcraft (don’t worry, all comes out well). As you can see, it would take the coming of 3-strip Technicolor, and a little more maturity on her part, to do full justice to Betty’s looks.)Ī few of the shorts stretch the meaning of “musical” in the title of the collection. (The picture here is of young Betty Grable, only 15 but already playing a married woman shopping for a baby. See, for example, the two-color Tech Over the Counter, in which a hustling young go-getter turns his father’s stodgy department store into a sort of daylight nightclub.
And the color shorts collected here - some, like Crazy House and The Devil’s Cabaret, composed of remnants of MGM’s aborted feature The March of Time (see Richard Barrios’s A Song in the Dark for a detailed retelling of that fiasco), while others were little mini-musicals created from scratch.
#Video shorts mgm 1938 archive
FitzPatrick Traveltalks (“As our boat pulls away from the shore and the sun sinks slowly in the west, we bid a reluctant farewell…”) - a fertile field for another Warner Archive collection. There were, for one thing, the ubiquitous James A.