Swingtime in the Movies

This almost half and hour two reel short subject could almost qualify as as a mini-musical with several numbers by songwriters M.K.Jerome and Jack Scholl. The film is a movie with a short as director Fritz Feld tries desperately to finish a western he's directing and replace his less than talented leading lady Helen Lynd who just can't quite master a mushmouth Southern accent.

Feld finds his new leading lady in the Warner Brothers studio cafeteria among the servers in the person of Katherine Kane. The highlight of the short is the break for lunch in the cafeteria where the servers do a number and the camera pans to several of the Warner Brothers stars taking a break.

As this film was done in color it rather than some of the feature for these stars might well be considered their respective color debuts.

Fritz Feld and assistant Charley Foy provide a lot of laughs. It's a worthwhile short subject and worthy of the Academy Award nomination it got in that category.

A Warner Bros. treat, filmed in bright Technicolor, SWINGTIME IN THE MOVIES is a breezy short subject the studio obviously used to demonstrate its skillful handling of color photography in the year that produced THE ADVENTURES OF ROBIN HOOD ('38).

FRITZ FELD is the irate director with a language problem--and obviously doing a take-off of Warner's director Michael Curtiz who used to fracture the English language ("Bring on the Empty Horses").

JOHN CARROLL gets a chance to demonstrate his rich baritone voice with some forgettable song numbers and KATHRYN KANE is the waitress who is discovered in the studio commissary when director Feld wants to find a girl with a Southern accent for his latest western.

A few Warner stars are seen in the commissary having lunch: HUMPHREY BOGART, PAT O'BRIEN and JOHN GARFIELD--in what may well be their debut in Technicolor.

Lots of fun.

I bet there were quite a few Hollywood directors who might have seen a bit of themselves in the "Nitvitch" character amiably portrayed here by Fritz Feld. He has a musical in the pipe called "Texas Tornado" and is struggling to find a leading lady who can speak with a Texican accent. Then, as luck would have it, a visit to a staff canteen full of real-life stars supping their 1930s equivalent of a kale smoothie and aspiring actresses who fawn at him, he discovers waitress "Joan" (Kathryn Kane) who has just the voice he's been seeking. Thing is, though, can she act, or sing, or learn lines? It's fair to say that his film is really just a portmanteau of themes from the western genre, so we have plenty of opportunity for her to show off her skills on stage and off whilst we take a pop at the vanity of the industry and the pomposity of directors who do that daft thing with their eyes through the square of their fingers. It's all very predictable, but I think that's part of the joke. How many movies did we ever sit down to watch and not know just what was going to happen at the end after five minutes? It pings the world of shallow characterisations, derivative writing and is actually quite an entertaining little twenty minutes. It is almost certainly not what you'd expect, given it's title, so give it a go.

Fritz Feld is making a musical western, but his leading lady can't do a southern accent, so he promotes Kathryn Kane from studio waitress to John Carroll's leading lady in this nifty Technicolor comedy short.

There are a lot of insider jokes, and some open to outsiders. Feld's character is based on autocratic Michael Curtiz, with his occasional malapropisms; a love song Carroll sings as Miss Kane paddles him in a birchbark canoe is meant to make fun of MGM's recent hit, ROSE MARIE, and so forth. There's a look at some Warner Brothers contract players, including Bogart and Pat O'Brien, and the Technicolor is, like most of Warner's color efforts in this period, lush.

Musical comedy film short about a scatter-brained Hollywood director named Mr. Nitvitch (Fritz Feld) trying to make a film called "The Texas Tornado". But he can't pronounce "tornado", and it comes out the Texas "tomato". The dialogue milks this for all it's worth. The film's overall tone is lighthearted, with a touch of romance.

Acting trends melodramatic, probably deliberately so. A highlight is the sequence at the "Superb Studio Cafe", where waitresses burst into song and dance, and then-current real-life actors make cameo appearances, with snippets about their careers, meant to be promos. Actors include: George Brent, Marie Wilson, Pat O'Brian, Humphrey Bogart, and John Garfield.

A couple of melodic songs helps a lot: "Drifting On The Rio Grande" and "The Toast Of The Texas Frontier".

Kinda silly and corny, the film nevertheless presents viewers with a time capsule of how movie making was viewed in the 1930s.