We Must Have Music

Talking about bad documentaries!!! Hahaha. Me personally I've heard of none of those so called stars in this flick yet it's portrayed as if containing the very best and nothing but. Yeah well, you wish!! Hahaha!

We Must Have Music (1942)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

Fans of MGM Musicals will certainly want to check this one out. It starts off with Judy Garland singing the title track, which is actually a cut scene from ZIEGFELD GIRL. We are then shown an old-time theater where silent pictures were shown with a man at a piano doing the score. After this we pretty much get MGM telling themselves how great they are by showing clips from THE Broadway MELODY, THE GREAT ZIEGFELD, BORN TO DANCE, BABES IN ARMS and many more of their hit Musicals. You pretty much have the idea of what this 9-minute short does. As I said, if you're a fan of MGM and their best genre then you're going to enjoy seeing the clips but those who are unfamiliar with the actual films would probably be best adviced to seek out the full movies. It was nice getting to see the Garland footage even though it has been shown in movies since this one.

This MGM promotional film covers the importance of music to movies, starting with a rather soulful woman singing "The Curse of an Aching Heart", and then a fade in and out to "the first important musical": THE BROADWAY MELODY (1929).

Well, it was important to MGM, I suppose. After that, it turns into an advertisement for the forthcoming MGM Nelson Eddy vehicle, THE CHOCOLATE SOLDIER. It flopped.

It was an important period in MGM when this was made. Arthur Freed had been a songwriter for MGM for a decade -- some of his songs were used in THE BROADWAY MELODY. He had been an uncredited producer on THE WIZARD OF OZ, and well working on a series of Mickey Rooney-Judy Garland musicals. The following year would see the premiere of Gene Kelly, and a decade-long sweep of great musicals.

Oh, this ends with a series of two-second shots of a couple of dozen shots of MGM stars. The point of this short is "Rent MGM musicals. They're patriotic" and to prove it, here's Rise Stevens singing "America the Beautiful."

What makes this short remarkable is that it not only contains footage of Judy Garland but also Deanna Durbin (not mentioned in the credits) It was made as a showcase for young talent at MGM and led to a contract for Judy Garland, Deanna Durbin though was released and went to Universal Studios.

This was basically a promotional short for the M-G-M musicals but there are some treats like Judy Garland's cut title number from Ziegfeld Girl, Rise Stevens' rendition of "America the Beautiful" cut from The Chocolate Soldier, Herbert Stothart conducting the score from said film, and Busby Berkeley choreographing the "Hoedown" number in Babes on Broadway. There's also scenes of the various studio musicals and, to really fill time just as I'm filling for number of lines in this review, pages of the studio movie titles along with the stars and the conductors with a check attached to each name of those latter occupation at the bottom of the papers. So on that note, We Must Have Music is worth a look for you're so inclined. It's an extra on the Ziegfeld Girl DVD.