Black Tights. Terence Young. 1961.

Well, that’s one way of doing letterboxing: By putting some purple stuff on top and below the movie.

This doesn’t even really pretend that much to be a movie: It’s a series of ballet scenes with a narrator in between. It looks like it may very well have been a lovely movie, but this has been sourced from a VHS taping of a broadcast, and that takes the enjoyment out of looking at these no doubt very good dancers.

Perhaps?

Murder With Music. George P. Quigley. 1941.

This movie is… it’s… it’s indescribably inept. I’m guessing that it’s made by somebody with no movie making experience, but with access to a large number of surprisingly enthusiastic singers and dancers?

It’s a no budget B movie. But the dance numbers are kinda enjoyable. It’s got more energy than talent, but it’s got a Plan 9 kinda vibe: It’s so awful that it’s fascinating.

There’s just a couple of sets, and probably filmed in the same room. It’s uper cramped, and they just seem to move fittings around to create the different set-ups.

I may be talking it up a bit here: It’s not a good movie, and you shouldn’t see it, but it does have charm.

Reaching for the Moon. Edmund Goulding. 1930.

Yes, I’m back to plowing through the box sets of public domain movies after a luxurious 4K break.

The version I have is 25 minutes shorter than the IMDB length, so I guess this is… the very un-restored version?

Irving Berlin… Douglas Fairbanks… Bebe Daniels? Is she famous? Oh, indeed she was: She did a buttload of stuff in the teens and the twenties, but only a dozen or so things in the 30s, and then she kinda disappeared, which probably explains who I can’t remember the name. I mean, other than my old timer’s disease.

Oh, I’ve seen her before in a horrible movie, made in the same year as this one.

This has Edward Everett Horton! My favourite!

It’s an odd movie. I was expecting some kind of cookie cutter screwball thing, but it’s not that: Instead it’s a movie in search of a plot. It’s got some great performances, but it’s just hard to not zone out. It’s just incomprehensible. Perhaps the missing 25 minutes had the plot bits?

Hm:

The film was originally intended to be a musical with songs written by Irving Berlin but problems soon developed. From the start, Berlin found Edmund Goulding, the director, difficult to work with. Also by mid-1930 the studio realized that the public’s demand for musicals had disappeared. So Goulding jettisoned many of Berlin’s songs from the score

That doesn’t explain why the plot is impossible to follow, though.

I likes all the scenes with Horton.