User Reviews

You hoid it here foist. The highlight of this short subject featuring Ozzie Nelson and his orchestra was Ozzie doing a nice novelty number in the end complete with Brooklyn accent, I'm Dancing With The Dames With The Moolah.

Of course there are some other good numbers, that old standard Chinatown My Chinatown with chorus doing the vocal. But Ozzie Nelson more than most liked to do those novelty numbers. When he first came up he was a radio crooner with a style I've called Rudy Vallee light. But when that style of crooning went passé, Nelson took up that all American image with a dash of Spike Jones in his work.

This is a pleasant short subject from the World War II years.

Ozzie Nelson and his band perform "Central Avenue Shuffle", 'Come On, Get Up", "Chinatown, My Chinatown" and "The Mamas With the Moolah", with Nelson and wife Harriet singing.

The Vitaphone musical shorts had certainly changed in the years since 1940, when Nelson had made his previous short. The earlier one had been one of a series that had been ongoing since 1926; although there had been some upgrading, with a camera that moved in the early 1930s, they still began with a master shot of the orchestra and spent a lot of time returning to it. Now, however, Jean Negulesco was in charge, and the camera zoomed, cuts were frequent, and staging showed a more story-telling edge to it.

Ozzie Nelson & His Orchestra (1943)

*** (out of 4)

Another nice entry in Warner's "Melody Masters" series, which was used to show audiences current popular musicians. Ozzie Nelson is the performing this time and it's clear the studio is hoping to get young women interested as they open up the short focusing in on his rather good looks and we even get a couple attractive women in the crowd looking at one another as if they were commenting on his good looks. We get four songs performed (Come On Get Up, Chinatown My Chinatown, The Mammas with the Moolah and Central Avenue Shuffle) and Nelson does a very good job with each of them. In between the music we get a couple strange "performances" where Nelson appears in bed when a rather annoying women comes and tries to wake him up. This is followed by another sequence where Nelson is once again in bed but this time he's in the Army and his men are trying to wake him up. I'm really not sure what the point of these were as they add very little to the film but they are mildly charming in a goofball type of way. 'The Mammas and the Moola' is clearly the highlight of the short and comes off last as Nelson, in his uniform, sings the song is a comic manor and I must admit that it was rather strange but at the same time catchy.

This is one of the newest of the Vitaphone shorts--known as a "Melody Master". These later musical shorts generally had been more straight forward and had simpler sets and no real story to tie it all together--just a famous band of the day doing their stuff. However, starting during the war years these shorts began to have a narrator and purported to give a bit of background on the band leader.

This is the second short I've seen in the last couple days featuring Ozzie Nelson (of "Ozzie & Harriet" fame) and his band. And, in both cases, Ozzie makes it well worth seeing because of a humorous talking-song. I say talking-song because his delivery sounds like both singing and reading a rhyming storybook--and it's both funny and clever. The other three numbers are also good--but the song about him not wanting to wake up is a classic--as is the punchline.

By the way, the woman in this song is NOT Ozzie's wife. And, in a nod to WWII, you see lots of folks in uniform throughout this short. See this one!