Calling All Girls

Warner Bros. supposedly presents a behind-the-scenes look at selecting the dancing girls in the big studio musicals. Then it's a clip show of several large scale musical performances. It's fine as a short in between movies but it's nothing great. The clips are not worth much. It's better to see the whole movies. The 'behind-the-scenes' section is rather short and fake. There are some fun look at the studio backlots. It's not really worthwhile like most clip shows on TV. It doesn't even have the stars do a bit of introduction to their clips. It's interesting for about five minutes and nothing else.

In the 1930s, Warner Brothers studio was well known for musicals, with many lovely films starring the likes of Dick Powell, Jimmy Cagney and Ruby Keeler. But by the 1940s, the studio very rarely made musicals...it just wasn't a style they found profitable. So, I was surprised to see a musical, "Calling All Girls" from Warner. Well, my surprise was short lived, as it turns out the film consists of stringing together clips from their better 1930s musicals. Yep...there really isn't anything new about any of this...and if you've seen the films, you'll remember the clips AND notice how young the actors are here!

Overall, with no new content, I cannot see much reason to watch this unless you hate musicals and want to pretend to your friends that you HAVE seen the likes of "Gold Diggers of 1933" and "Footlight Parade".

If you like this stuff at all, these big dance scenes, this is a great 25 minute short with one number after another using literally hundreds of dancers in some of them.

You can't beat the waterfall scene with 100+ beautiful dancers/swimmers.

It's wonderfully dated.

Calling All Girls (1942)

** (out of 4)

Nineteen-minute short was probably highly entertaining back in 1942 but today it doesn't hold up well for one single reason. The short pretty much starts off talking about how Hollywood, every once in a while, opens up their doors for new talent to arrive and for our shorts sake a new musical is about to be shot so they're "calling all girls". We then get musical numbers from various Busby Berkeley films including WONDER BAR, FOOTLIGHT PARADE and GOLD DIGGERS OF 1933/35. There's no question that the music contained in this short is terrific and the dance numbers are marvelous but it's somewhat hard to recommend this short when all four features are easily available to be viewed. In my opinion a lot of these dance numbers lose some of their touch when they're not seen within the entire original film. Since the above movies weren't in circulation when this short was released, I'm sure this had a lot of benefit to those originally seeing it but today there's really no point in it. Check out the original films and you'll be a lot happier that you did.

Here's one of those Warner Brothers short subjects made up of clips from old movies. After narrator Owen Crump talks about pretty girls making a play to become Hollywood stars, it's time for a casting call: Busby Berkley needs a lot of women for one of his production numbers! Too bad he's gone to MGM to direct Esther Williams films!

Jean Negulesco is credited as director, but it's more a job of editing, with plenty of process shots and some liberal use of an optical printer. Negulesco entered the movies and his earliest direction was of Warner's musical shorts, and his editing was a lot more complex than earlier workers' had been.