User Reviews

This shortie from Warner Brothers opens with a young Ozzie Nelson introducing "Wave the Stick Blues", a comical bit where he argues with the band, singing and talking his way through the song. "Begin the Beguine". Then they highlight soloist members of the band in "Put on your old Grey Bonnet". Some quick fingers on the pi-anny! Done about the same time and the same comedy style as Xavier Cougat or Kay Kyser..... entertaining the audience while playing great music! Directed by Roy Mack, King of the short films. Short but fun. Kind of bland by today's standards, but things were much more simple back then. (This was about twelve years before his LONG running family show TV series. 435 episodes!) Shown on turner classics in between.

. . . that the centerpiece of Ozzie Nelson's first film credit is a "day in the life" type song about a band leader. It is not a good day. A life insurance salesman barges into his office to shill some product. Then a no-talent trumpeter tries to talk himself into an audition, while disparaging Nelson's current players in the same breath. Then most of his band is late for rehearsal. As our "Golden Agers" know, Ozzie transitioned from Swing Band Conductor into playing himself on one of television's earliest "reality shows." Though many child stars had previously grown up on the "Silver Screen" (and prior to that, on Vaudeville), son Ricky Nelson was one of the first to grow up under his REAL name on TV. After the OZZIE & HARRIET SHOW folded, Ricky followed in his father's footsteps by becoming a band leader himself. To complete the Circle of Life, Ricky experienced an even worse day in that capacity than his father sang about in 1940. Four and a half decades after OZZIE NELSON AND HIS ORCHESTRA was released, Ricky joined Glenn Miller and Buddy Holley as Music Makers who fell from the sky.

"Ozzie Nelson & His Orchestra" is a very pleasant Vitaphone short featuring Nelson and his assorted musicians seemingly having a lot of fun with a few musical numbers and some rhyming patter. Nelson's dance band was surely not in the same vein as the popular jazz big bands of, say, Benny Goodman or Count Basie, but it does succeed in entertaining us in this short.

My favorite sequences: Ozzie opens this film singing a humorous medium-swing tune about the rigors of leading a band of undisciplined, fun-loving musicians (I especially admire the line "You'll understand if my hair turns to gray, / and they have to take me away"); this then leads into a sketch in which the dialogue is spoken in rapid rhyme as Ozzie interacts with his band, his secretary, and a couple of unwanted visitors. The closing number "Put On Your Old Grey Bonnet" (reminding me of the Bugs Bunny cartoon "Little Red Riding Rabbit" [1944]) is fun to listen to as it is sung by the orchestra and treated in a highly mocking fashion; with more rhyming dialogue, Ozzie expresses chagrin to his musicians for "jazzing up" a sweet song, but they convince him to lighten up.

Being a jazz musician myself and an admirer of the big band sound, I find "Ozzie Nelson & His Orchestra" to be a nice treat. The other song they do, Cole Porter's "Begin the Beguine", is not a song that I'm crazy about, but the orchestra at least does a fine job of making it swing.