Strictly average movie

The first must-see film of the year.

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.

This is the sort of musical short that my grandparents would have described as classy: with the perspective of eighty years, conductor/orchestrator/pianist Johnny Green comes off as a sort of cut-rate Gershwin -- which is unfair. He had a fairly distinctive career in popular highbrow music. By the 1950s he would be seen in several shorts from MGM conducting the house orchestra in light classics. Here he shows up in white evening clothes playing the piano in a fairly flashy manner.Harry von Zell, best remembered for being a member of George Burns and Gracie Allen's stock company offers some linking material. He is shockingly thin given what I remember of his appearances in the 1950s.