Hollywood Hobbies (1939)
Billy Rose's Casa Manana Revue (1938)
Love on Tap (1939)
It's fitting that George Sidney's early shorts often have show-biz subjects, since he came from a show-biz background, with a Broadway-producer father and a stage-actress mother. He performed in vaudeville as a child and hit Hollywood as a young adult, starting as a messenger at MGM and becoming the youngest-ever senior director of Our Gang comedies at 21 years old. He then worked on the Crime Does Not Pay and Pete Smith Specialty series before moving to features in the early 1940s, directing such popular fare as Thousands Cheer (1943), Kiss Me Kate (1953), Pal Joey (1957), and Bye Bye Birdie (1963).
Billy Rose's Casa Mañana Revue (1938) takes place in the title nightclub, where the title impresario hears his performers worry that watering holes like his-and jobs like theirs--are on the way out. He solves the problem by agreeing to assemble a super-spectacle featuring the best of the nightclub's former shows. But there's a stumbling block: Dixon & Mason, a girlfriend-and-boyfriend dance team, are feuding with each other. This time it's Rose's cigar-chomping assistant who saves the day, reconciling the couple and turning the duo into a trio by adding Ms. Mason's young niece to the act. The comedic moments in this 21-minute short are pretty tame. But it's fun to watch Rose play himself, and some of the dance routines use choreography athletic enough to border on acrobatics. There are also some lively production numbers in the 42nd Street (1933) tradition. Call it Busby Berkeley Lite.
Producer: Louis Lewyn
Director: George Sidney
Cast: Lee Dixon (Dixon), Virginia Grey (Mason), Harriet Hoctor (Dancer), Stuart Morgan Dancers, Billy Rose (Himself).
BW-21m.
Love on Tap (1939) packs almost as much diverting fluff into a mere 11 minutes. The main characters are Tommy and Penny, a couple whose wedding keeps getting postponed because the dancers Penny manages-the Merriel Abbott Dancers, playing themselves-keep running into problems she has to solve, from one girl's boyfriend woes to another's case of the mumps. Tommy finally draws the line, insisting on getting married now or never. He and Penny race to the plane that'll whisk them to their wedding, only to be stopped by a police car filled with the dancers, all a-flutter because their costumes have gone missing. Tommy flies off without his would-be bride, whereupon a dancer arranges to have him arrested for "stealing" a sad-faced dog given to him and Penny as a wedding present. Back in Penny's arms, having missed an important board meeting as well as the wedding he'd arranged, Tommy takes the whole uproar with inexplicable good humor. The plot is so lightweight that it hardly exists, but again Sidney delivers some sprightly dance routines. Call it Diet Busby Berkeley Lite.
Producer: Louis Lewyn
Director: George Sidney
Screenplay: Richard Goldstone, Stanley Rauh
Cinematography: Jackson Rose
Film Editing: Tom Biggart
Cast: Merriel Abbott Dancers, Mary Howard (Penny), Truman Bradley (Tommy), Garwood Van (Orchestra Leader).
BW-11m.
Hollywood Hobbies (1939) falls into the genre of show-off-the-studio's-stable-of-stars movies. Written by Morey Amsterdam, later a fine comedian on TV's excellent The Dick Van Dyke Show and elsewhere, the 10-minute comedy finds a pair of goggle-eyed tourists (Joyce Compton and Sally Payne) paying a tour guide (William Benedict) to drive them around Hollywood so they can ogle movie stars. The latter turn out to be MGM stars, naturally, and they're all pursuing leisure activities-Reginald Denny testing a model plane, Robert Young and Allan Jones greeting the birth of a colt at their horse farm, everyone from Cesar Romero and Joan Davis to James Cagney and Spencer Tracy at a celebrity baseball game, and Clark Gable preparing a batch of whitewash to paint his barn. As always, Sidney keeps the action moving at a snappy clip, although there's just so much you can do with Clark Gable preparing a batch of whitewash.
Producer: Louis Lewyn
Director: George Sidney
Screenplay: Morey Amsterdam
Film Editing: Tom Biggart
Cast: Joyce Compton (Tourist), Sally Payne (Tourist), William Benedict (Tour Guide), Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, James Cagney, James Stewart.
BW-10m.
While it sounds like a Walt Disney cartoon, Willie and the Mouse is a ten-minute documentary Sidney directed in 1941 for MGM's multi-segment John Nesbitt's Passing Parade series, which Nesbitt produced and narrated. The subject is classroom education. According to the movie, this was primitive and inefficient in bygone days, when ferocious spinsters with names like Miss Schwarzenheimer drilled information into kids' heads by rote; but it's pleasant and enlightened in 1941, with attractive young instructors helping youngsters learn by choosing the methods best suited to each particular child. What brought this brave new world into being was-get ready for a surprise-research tests on mice, which demonstrated the merits of individualized teaching by discovering how rodents learn to win cheese rewards by finding their way through mazes. Accomplishing this research necessitates some disagreeable activity, such as deliberately giving a poor little mouse an "inferiority complex" by setting cheese-getting goals it can't meet. But the final result is deepened understanding of how laboratory mice and little kids learn. Directing this, Sidney must have found it a contract assignment of the most tedious kind. Yet it's nice to imagine that he too learned something valuable, since one of his cleverest coups in later years was to team Gene Kelly with Jerry the Mouse for a dance number in the 1945 musical Anchors Aweigh. That's something even Busby Berkeley could have been proud of.
Producer: John Nesbitt
Director: George Sidney
Music: Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Cast: John Nesbitt (Narrator), Bobby Anderson (Boy with airplane), Hillary Brooke (Modern Schoolteacher), Mary MacLaren (Miss Schwarzenheimer).
BW-10m.
by Mikita Brottman and David Sterritt
