Skinnay Ennis and His Orchestra

Skinnay Ennis & His Orchestra (1941)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

If you watch enough Turner Classic Movies then you've surely ran into one of the various shorts made between Warner and Vitaphone. This one here features Skinnay Ennis, someone I had never heard of before, and he does four fairly good numbers even if none of them are what you'd call masterpieces. 'Three Little Words' is jitterbug all the way and not only do we get Ennis performing the music but we get a couple dancers who do a very nice job as well. According to the IMDb the dancers are unknown but both are impressive. Cole Porter's 'Let's Do It' is performed by an uncredited singer and she too is pretty good. There are a couple scenes where we get to see the "inspiration" for the song including 'A Boy, a Girl and the Lamplight' which has the "action" of a man and woman meeting (you guessed it) under a lamplight. Fans of these types of musicals will want to check it out but it's certainly far from the best out there.

This is one of the later Vitaphone shorts--known as a "Melody Master". These later musical shorts generally were more straight forward and had simpler sets and no real story to tie it all together--just a famous band of the day doing their stuff.

Like the other reviewer, I'd never heard of Skinnay Ennis before I saw this short. I did a quick read on him on IMDb and found that his death was a bit sad and premature. As for his singing, Ennis was very, very smooth but not especially strong. It's pleasant but not at all distinguished. Because of this, I preferred when the jitterbug style song followed. And, unlike all the other jitterbuggers I've seen in "Melody Master" films, this team was actually pretty athletic and talented (the rest tended to be very tame--probably to appeal to a wider audience). However, the team STILL is downright zombie-like compared to the frenetic jitterbugging you'd have seen in Harlem at the time (I've seen film of them dancing so quickly I almost felt like it was faked). The rest of the songs are ordinary--though it did heat up a bit near the end.