Hollywood Wonderland

Lavish musical short assembled from Warner Bros. and its archives. I really enjoyed the 16-minutes full of song, dance, and riveting Technicolor. Oh sure, some of the musical bits are better than others, and I agree with a fellow reviewer that Foran should be singing Pagliacci instead of a western ballad. Nonetheless, for us guy viewers, there's plenty of eye-catching girls dancing their way into our hearts and maybe dreams. Note too how immaculately dressed everyone is, along with the bomber hats women wore in those days-- Yikes! Anyway, to me it's a great little short, just bursting with eye-appeal. There's no particular message except for Hooray for Hollywood. Thanks WB.

Hollywood Wonderland (1947)

*** (out of 4)

This Warner short pretty much takes us on a tour of their studio and we get to see several of their musical shorts being put together. We go behind the scenes on GYPSY SWEETHEART, SWINGTIME IN THE MOVIES, THE CHANGING OF THE GUARD and RIDE, COWBOY RIDE. We get to see clips from the movies then we go into the studio to see the songs being recorded and matched up to the lip movement on the screen. I'm sure various other films have shown this but I still got a kick out of watching this short and seeing all the work be done. We also get clips from a film called THE Sunday ROUND UP, which is a very good one worth catching on Turner Classic Movies. Look fast for Ann Sheridan and Lauren Bacall photos. Horror fans will also notice Glenn Strange from RIDE, COWBOY, RIDE.

It's old Hollywood trying to showcase its wares. There are songs. There are costumes. There is dancing. It's good. I like the dancing waitresses holding the fake plates of food. It's not particularly insightful but it's fine.

Here's one of those shorts that Hollywood in general and in this case, Warner Brothers in particular, produced to tell audiences how wonderful it was. Robert Arthur, dressed like a bellhop, wanders through the studio to sing little introductions to to clips from half a dozen of the studio's Technicolor and musical sequences, chosen from movies produced from 1935 through 1939.

Warners did a bunch of these compilation shorts in the post-war years. They were economical to produce, since they used a lot of old footage, filled the catalogue with shorts for those theaters which ran full feature-and-selected-shorts programs and touted the expertise, hard work, and expense of producing these movies.

The best thing about this sixteen-minute short is the eye-popping Technicolor. The music is ho-hum and at times downright boring, snipped from Warner Brothers musical shorts of the previous decade. Ukulele Ike (Cliff Edwards, aka Jiminy Cricket)is pleasing, singing and playing a guitar rather than a ukulele. Cowboy Dick Foran shows why singing shoot-em-up pictures came to be called horse operas. Unlike Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, and Tex Ritter, Foran's voice was more suitable for opera than for western ballads. His style was derivative of Nelson Eddy rather than Bing Crosby.

For smirks, there's Clark Gable lookalike John Carroll warbling a song while in a canoe. Carroll turned out to be a much better actor than his reputation would indicate. For movie buffs there's a glimpse of starlet Lauren Bacall as her picture floats across the screen while the narrator emphasizes the importance of photography in the making of a Hollywood film.

Mainly for die-hard fans of 1930's-era popular music, "Hollywood Wonderland" is more like Hollywood Babalu-land.

Footnote: The tour guide is the same Wanda Hendrix who played Pilar in the film noir thriller, "Ride the Pink Horse," the same year.