Oh, that’s a name I haven’t seen in a while… was that a 70s thing? Yes it was. This must be the final First Artists movie, perhaps? It was set up as a thing for the hot actors who wanted to make movies slightly outside the system, but not really, like Barbra Streisand, Paul Newman, Sidney Poitier, Dustin Hoffman and Steve McQueen (quoting Wikipedia).

William Wiard is a name I can’t recall seeing before, but he made a buttload of TV… and this is his only film?

I was a bit distracted while watching this, but… I kinda wasn’t feeling it? There were good bits, though.

Tom Horn. William Wiard. 1980. ⚂

This short was included on the Swing Time DVD… it’s really funny so far.

This is super corny and very amusing. The production values seem to be a lot higher than usual for this kind of thing.

This is (as usual) just an excuse to string some musical numbers together… and the cinematography is a bit… wonky? But man, these number are poppin! I can’t take my eyes off of the screen.

Mack has done a gazillion of things, and it pretty much looks like all of them are shorts? So this was his thing.

Now, OK, this isn’t a cinematic masterpiece, but for its genre (“stringing together vaudeville acts into a b movie”), it’s absolutely perfect — I’ve never seen anything as good as this in that genre. There’s not a millisecond of time wasted: It’s all zingers (some of them good) and singing and dancing (some of it excellent).

It’s some kind of genius, so:

Hotel a la Swing. Roy Mack. 1937. ⚅

Hm… surely I’ve seen this before?

I can’t recall it, though. Perhaps I haven’t? It just seems in-credible.

No, I have seen this! And it’s hilarious.

This is perfect! Even the meet cute wasn’t as harassey as usual, and more based on coincidences than putting on the hard word.

Swing Time. George Stevens. 1936. ⚄