Dancing on the Ceiling

This was a decent musical/comedic short that was an extra on my 'Double Wedding' DVD, disc 3 of my 'TCM Spotlight: Myrna Loy and William Powell Collection'. Though it definitely utilizes the poor-boy version, or the second fiddles, of the studio's song-and-dance division, I had no trouble with it. I wouldn't have specifically paid to watch something of this resolutely mediocre quality, but seeing it as a free extra tacked on wasn't bad. It's short and sweet and gives one a different look at what a musical number from the period, either on Broadway or in film, would be like. Glad I spent a few minutes watching this little curio from four generations ago.

"Dancing on the Ceiling" begins with a guy following a lady. She ducks into an office and he follows...not realizing he's just walked into the strangest dental office on the planet!! It's like a combination dentist and Busby Berkeley production number. However, the dancing and especially the acting are amazingly wooden. Eventually, the female dentist gives the guy gas and he has some weird hallucinations about everyone being upside down and dancing on the ceiling!! At the end, he asks for more gas!!

This is a must-see film...not because it's good (it's not) but because it's so utterly strange! You just have to see it to believe it. And, it makes you wonder about the people who made the short, especially since it seems like they are endorsing the use of recreational laughing gas!!

The one weak part of the lovely "Myrna Loy and William Powell Collection" (Manhattan Melodrama / Evelyn Prentice / Double Wedding / I Love You Again / Love Crazy) is the special features of each disc. Most feature a bad cartoon and a Pete Smith short (I can't stand Pete Smith's voice or sense of "humor"). Double Wedding has this short instead. I watched hoping for something akin to Astaire in Royal Wedding, but this was done long before the technique was developed and just flips the film upside down. The plot is basically a whorehouse of dentistry, and done badly at that. Pete Smith would have been preferable!

Dancing on the Ceiling (1937)

** (out of 4)

Minor musical short from MGM has got to have one of the silliest set ups in film history. A man with a loose tooth walks into a dentist office and sees that the dentist is a woman as is all of her assistance. They give him some gas and then it's off to the music as a big dance hall breaks out. The entire gimmick is that the songs and dance moves are built around what you would see or do at a dentist office. This includes teeth pulling items, gas and various other goodies. This film certainly isn't any good because the direction of the musical numbers are rather bland and the songs are weak but at the same time I couldn't take my eyes off the screen because you never knew what was going to happen next. This isn't a film you should seek out but if you come across it on TCM and have nine-minutes to kill you might want to give it a quick peak.

This short subject from MGM is a passably good short musical about a man who pursues a pretty girl to a dentist's office and discovers this place is the Busby Berkeley School of Dentistry. All women who look like chorus girls at the office and this guy thinks he arrived in heaven.

I thought I would be seeing and hearing the Rodgers&Hart classic Dancing On A Ceiling in this film. Disappointed there, but this is an amusing bit of fluff.