The Frank Morgan Clip Show

As you can probably figure out from both the title of the movie and the title of my post, the Morgan in question is MGM's supporting actor Frank Morgan. He's playing himself, but this version of Frank Morgan is an actor who's gotten old enough that he wants to get out of acting and into producing, where he thinks the big money is. (This was, of course, before the auteur days, so becoming a director was as much contract work as being an actor was.) So he calls up the head of production, which is not Louis B. Mayer playing himself, but Leon Ames playing K.F., real name never given. KF has finally had it with the idea of actors getting ideas above their station, so he decides to approve Morgan's request, if only to show him not everyone can be a producer.

And, as you might guess, K.F. is quite right, with the bumbling, dyspeptic Morgan quickly falling way behind on production of the film he's been assigned. This, however, not before talking to a couple of people whose names you've seen on a ton of MGM movies but whose faces you don't normally get to see: Cedric Gibbons from the art direction department; sound recordist Douglas Shearer (yes, Norma's brother); and costume designer Irene. Production is stopped on the movie, and Morgan tries to save it by editing together the footage he's already got into something coherent.

However, Morgan knocks a bunch of film reels off the shelves, and seems not to pay any attention to what he puts back together, because while the "movie" he takes to the screening reel is theoretically a story about illicit lovers in 1880s country England, it's really one minute of that and 30 minutes of clips. There are a couple of one-reel shorts that I think are fully intact; the Passing Parade entry Our Old Car as well as a Pete Smith short on badminton. The rest, according to sources, is deleted material from other films. Eleanor Powell does a musical number; Virginia O'Brien sings with Tommy Dorsey; and some group I'd never heard of called the King Sisters do a World War II morale-booster thanking Christopher Columbus for discovering America.

I'm not certain what MGM were thinking when they put this into production; supposedly it was designed in part for overseas audiences, which makes me wonder whether they were making The Great Morgan for that part of the overseas market that hadn't been able to access Hollywood films during World War II. In any case, the movie doesn't work, not helped by the fact that Frank Morgan is even more of a blowhard here than his characters in other movies were. There's a great gag at the end, a mercifully short end as the movie runs just 57 minutes.