OK, this is just a music programme thing?

I’m fine with that. We start off with Duke Ellington?

Yup.

It’s really nice!

I like all these tunes.

“Your cash ain’t nothing but trash / but I’m sure gonna get me some more”

And there’s skits!

Dinah Washington!

Gorgeous song.

Nat King Cole.

By Emacs! He’s amazeballs!

This is brilliant.

Heh. Kohn did ten music pics over a two year period? And then nothing? I wonder what the story there was, because there’s nothing here I don’t like: The performances are fantastic (especially that Nat King Cole thing), and the cinematography is fun and bouncy, and it’s tautly edited (no boring bits), and it’s… just a joy to watch.

If you’re not into watching live performances, you might not find this fascinating, but for me it’s:

Rock’n’Roll Revue. Joseph Kohn. 1956. ⚅

Hm… Oh, this is a bunch of featurettes strung together? So it’s basically a Bing Crosby video hour.

I mean, film hour.

This guy does the introductions.

imdb sums it up:

Film director Bud Pollard appears on screen to tell us of Bing Crosby’s rise to fame, using scenes from four early Crosby shorts to illustrate his fictional biography.

As you’d expect from this sort of thing, the technical quality is pretty bad. I mean, these are shorts from the early 30s that have been transferred onto new film in 1947, and then this is an unrestored DVD copy of that.

So you can barely see what’s going on, and there’s more hiss than sound on the audio track.

Bing Crosby sure had a nice voice. And these shorts look like they’re really fun! But they’ve been edited down to just a scene or two, so they don’t really… make much sense?

But I’m kinda enjoying myself?

Accidental blackface.

I love how no lions were hurt during that special effects scene.

“I may act gay / that’s just a pose / I’m not that way”

By any sensible scoring system, this should be a ⚀. But nobody has ever accused me of being sensible! I really enjoyed watching this: The tunes are great, Bing sounds great (between all the crackles), and the gags are really silly. The racist bits aren’t even that racist!

So:

The Road to Hollywood. Del Lord, Leslie Pearce, Bud Pollard, Mack Sennett. 1952. ⚂

Hey. Lana Turner.

I’m watching the last few movies from a couple of public domain DVD box sets I bought in 2017. I think there were about 70 movies in total in those sets?

I’ve got… eight movies left.

Well, this is in colour, which is unusual, but it’s totally unrestored… I wonder where it’s sourced from? It looks very soft (which might point to a TV transmission at some point in the er provenance), but it’s got scratches that are totally sharp. So… it’s from a film copy?

Very odd.

Right:

This is one of a handful of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer productions of the 1950-1951 period whose original copyrights were never renewed and are now apparently in Public Domain; for this reason this title is now offered, often in very inferior copies, at bargain prices, by numerous VHS and DVD distributors who do not normally handle copyrighted or Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer material.

And I guess it’s because it sucks:

In her autobiography, Lana Turner revealed that she thought the script for the film was stupid. She fought against doing the film, but lost.

Oh yeah, this is a musical. Turner’s vocals have been looped in, apparently.

Director Hartman had been working in movies since the early 30s, but mostly as a writer (and composer). He only directed this handful of movies… and… based on this one, it’s odd that he even got to make this many movies.

But apparently the three 40s movies are supposed to be good?

OK, this is just totally without any sort of interest, so I’m bailing after half an hour. Too bad, because Lana Turner can be fun.

Mr. Imperium. Don Hartman. 1951. ⚀