The Great Morgan

Beloved American character actor Frank Morgan plays himself in this offbeat film. Morgan, who thinks he's not getting the respect he deserves, convinces studio head K.F. (Leon Ames) to let him produce his own movie. The result is a curious and jumbled collection of short subjects, including several musical numbers, a sentimental look at "Our Old Car", and a segment about badminton. All shorts are strung together with shots of Morgan and Ames watching the movie in a screening room.

Morgan is his usual befuddled self, Ames is classy and dignified as usual, and some of the shorts are mildly entertaining. The musical numbers are very dated, and the badminton short just goes on and on and on. "Our Old Car" is pretty good for lovers of nostalgia. The final gag is quite funny, if you can wait that long. Good movie for die-hard Morgan fans, tough sledding for others.

Frank Morgan (Frank Morgan) is struggling to make a studio movie. He is frustrated with delay and starts cutting together the film himself. When he shows it to the buyers, everybody is surprised that he had edited in segments of unrelated films and whole entire shorts.

Frank roaring is the funniest bit in the movie. This is a clip show pretending to be a movie. Too many of these clips offer nothing to the audience other than the possibility of recognizing them from somewhere else. They're not particularly funny and we have sit through them. A few are a bit interesting, but nothing to write home about.

I'm a fan of character actor Frank Morgan (the wizard in "The Wizard Of Oz"), and, as a fan of old films, I think the work that is being done with film preservation is much needed. So, when I read that this hour-long film which had been thought lost had been found, I was quite interested.

Yawn. There's nothing here to hold your attention for an hour. There's a silly plot line with frustrated actor Morgan becoming a bumbling producer. In actuality, that thin plot attempts to hold together a number of MGM shorts...but it's not short enough. These shorts are of minimal interest (or is it just that it's dated?).

This film was a great disappointment, and I can only assume that Frank Morgan was forced to do this film.

Frank Morgan, the professional bumbler, decides he's not getting the respect (and money) he deserves at "the studio," so he calls studio boss "KF" -- Leon Ames -- and demands the job of producing a picture. His proposition is, surprisingly, accepted, and after weeks of Morgan's confused shooting, and going ever farther behind schedule and over budget, KF demands to see the result. Disgusted with the professional editor's inability to make any sense from the available footage, Morgan fires him and cuts and splices the film himself -- after, predictably, dumping the contents of the film storage shelves on the cutting room floor.

In the projection room, the resulting product, of course, turns out to be a disaster. (Everything about this movie and the film-within-the-film is predictable, but who cares?) Interspersed with a bit of inane "original footage" -- some of it, naturally, upside down -- Frank has picked up pieces of other MGM productions, which are presented complete and straight: A "Donkey Serenade" (not Allan Jones'}; a neat Elinor Powell dance sequence; songs by Virginia O'Brien with an unbilled Tommy Dorsey and Band, and by the King Sisters; and two MGM shorts complete with title, credit, and "The End" cards -- the familiar John Nesbitt Passing Parade "Our Old Car," and a "new" (to me and IMDb) Pete Smith Specialty on professional "Badminton," that's worth the price of admission.

A very entertaining little movie, especially if you like Morgan and the films of the '40s. I do.

I'm not one of those intense movie aficionados, someone who has seen like 90+% of every movie made, and know more about movies than producers, directors, actors, etc. but I have seen a lot of different movies and remember most of them. I watched this movie on TCM the other night and immediately realized it was a first attempt at the genre of movies that include Amazon Women on the Moon, Kentucky Fried Movie, the Groove Tube, and others. This had that same kind of offbeat humor - a satire that parodies how old time stuidios work. And it had enough character actors such as Ben Blue, Arthur Space and others to make it interesting to those who look for bits of Hollywood history (besides introducing to the audience real backstage talents of the golden age of movies).. The plot is threadbare, the acting is almost amateurish, but the end result is, if you like that kind of humor, mildly enjoyable. A 1 star by itself, a 6 star if you appreciate this kind of humor and see it as the first of a new genre.