... and just for the chance to do a little psychoanalysis on Louis B. Mayer decades after his death and how he saw himself and MGM is worth the price of admission. I'll get to that later.
This film is too long to be a short, too short to be a feature. It is something like a hybrid between a short, a feature, and "The MGM Parade" that MGM began doing around 1950 to showcase its upcoming products on television and in theatres.
There is not much of a plot. You are obviously at MGM because at the beginning you see breakfast being taken to an office marked "William Powell" and you don't see him but you do hear his voice which could come from a piece of audio of any one of the many films Powell did for MGM.
No, the star of this show is Frank Morgan, playing it befuddled but endearing as always, and this time he is on the phone demanding to be a producer. The exec on the other end says "Sure! Why not! Every nitwit on this lot thinks they can be a producer." So Morgan takes this as a compliment and begins to set up his film. You see Morgan calling up Cedric Gibbons, Douglas Shearer, and Irene, famed art director, sound director, and costume designer respectively. Thing is, Morgan doesn't know what to do with any of them. He actually has to ask somebody who Shearer is.
The film goes about the way you'd expect - the film is shut down after getting 41 days behind schedule. Morgan also winds up running the film editor out of the editing room and putting the picture together himself and the results are predictably chaotic.
Leon Ames plays studio exec "K.F." who is not amused by what Morgan ends up with, but low and behold, Morgan did manage to accidentally splice in five short MGM subjects and for some reason "K.F." makes Morgan watch the entire thing. Or, I should say, he makes the audience watch the entire thing.
There are three musical numbers and two human interest shorts, one being a Pete Smith short on badminton, and the other "The Passing Parade" with John Nesbitt talking about a family's history through the automobiles they've owned. They're all pretty good, but there is some weirdness here. One of the musical numbers features Eleanor Powell, and she was out of MGM by 1943. The first musical number is bizarre with singer Carlos Ramirez on a donkey, with a rather terrified looking Latino boy in desperate need of an orthodontist riding up front. Carlos appears to be stalking singer Lucille Norman, who in spite of her costume looks like a knock-off of Maureen O'Hara. She stops, Carlos disappears, and as she puts out one of her hands as she sings, Carlos grabs it. I'm surprised this went over in the rather xenophobic 1940's, but it is from an actual short entitled "Musical Masterpieces". The third musical number is by The King Sisters whose footage was cut from the film of origin. So you're not exactly getting truth in advertising if you think ALL of this is typical and current MGM product.
The psychoanalyzing of Louis B. to which I was referring? To be kind, L.B. was not a good looking guy, yet the studio head of MGM is played by Leon Ames, a very handsome man. Is this how L.B. saw himself? Are these shorts how he saw MGM's future when in fact it was their past? Did this entire thing pretty much predict the slow decline MGM was about to experience? And what of Nat Perrin, the guy who wrote and directed this thing, making him the Orson Welles of the Great Morgan? Well, he actually had a pretty diverse career including being head writer on "The Addams Family" twenty years later.
Do stick around for the end. It's a cute little joke including the MGM lion in one of his few talking roles. I'd say if you are a film history buff it is right up your alley and much better than the current rating.
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