Annie Laurie

This is an unusual short from MGM in that instead of the usual no-name or very small-time actors, this one has two genuine stars...just before they hit stardom. Dennis Morgan and Anne Rutherford are the leads-- Morgan before he switched to Warner Brothers and met with considerable success and Rutherford before she was in "Gone With the Wind" and the Andy Hardy films.

Annie and William (Rutherford and Morgan) are desperately in love but their clans are on opposite sides during the war in 18th century Scotland. So their love seemed destined for naught since William, naturally, is unwilling to renounce his clan to wed Annie.

The film looked great and featured some nice acting and singing...but the story itself...meh. It didn't impress me. The ending, in particular, seemed VERY anticlimactic.

Dennis Morgan, perpetual Irish-American tenor, makes a stab at a Scots accents, although not a very convincing one. He does sing the opening lines of "Annie Laurie" nicely, and Miss Rutherford is quite lovely , especially when backlit. She sounds a bit squeaky, though, like a mouse. Or, if she were to try a Scots accent, a moose.

Cinematographer Charles Clarke had been lighting the scenes for movies since 1920. He had spent most of the early 1930s at MGM, but within a couple of years, he would be at 20th Century-Fox, where his career would end in 1961. He died in 1983 at the age of 84.

MGM had Dennis Morgan under contract for the first few years of his career under his real name Stanley Morner. His most famous "role" was that of the singer in the A Pretty Girl is Like a Melody number of The Great Ziegfeld. Unfortunately somebody decided to dub Allan Jones's voice instead of Morgan's and poor Dennis was out in the cold until he got to Warner Brothers.

They did make use of him here in this short subject about the origins of the song Annie Laurie and his pleasant tenor was just the voice for this old Scot's melody.

Dennis had to wait for stardom at another studio, but this short subject does show the potential he had.

Annie Laurie (1936)

** (out of 4)

Lackluster short from MGM really doesn't work on any level. The ten-minute film tells us how the Scotish song "Annie Laurie" happened to be written. As it turns out Scotland was in the middle of a major civil war when lovers (Dennis Morgan, Ann Rutherford) get torn apart. Both Morgan and Rutherford would end up making some memorable films in their career even though neither name is really noticeable today. Morgan is probably best remembered by horror fans with his role in the 1939 horror film THE RETURN OF DR. X. Rutherford would appear in several Andy Hardy films so she too would be remembered by some film buffs. This film here is rather poorly made and the direction can't be seen. The movie tells the story fairly easily but it's boring. The action scenes are also boring and the movie really does drag at even ten-minutes.