Rudolph Friml, Jr.

Warner Bros. liked to make a lot of musical shorts, both two-reelers telling a bare-bones story and one-reelers that were more of a spotlight for a singer or a band. One that showed up recently was Six Hits and a Miss.

The opening credits are interesting for a couple of reasons. One is that they mention director Jean Negulesco, who was still at the stage of his career where he was directing shorts; he wouldn't graduate to features until a few years later with The Mask of Dimitrios followed by a string of interesting movies first at Warner Bros. and then at Fox. The other is that the band here is conducted by Rudolph Friml, Jr. That of course implies that Friml Sr. was someone of enough renown that there would be a need -- or have been a need back in the day -- to differentiate between the two. Sure enough, the original Rudolf Friml was a Czech composer of light operettas; you might know a couple of his works for having been turned into the Jeanette MacDonald movies The Firefly and Rose Marie.

As for the short, it involves Friml and his band, accompanied by a singing group called the titular Six Hits and a Miss for having a female lead and six men providing harmony, at least until the group was broken up by the wartime draft. They sing a song called "You've Got to Know How to Dance". And herein lies another interesting thing about this short. The song was earlier used in the 1936 movie Colleen, and here Warner Bros. reuses footage from the dance number that accompanied the song in Colleen to intercut the new footage. Now, it wasn't uncommon for such footage to be resued, or even movies to be re-released, as that was in 1942 the only way the stuff would get back out in the public and make a few bucks for the studio again. There was no television yet to have a late late show showing old movies.

As for the quality of this particular short, it's OK if not great. I'm not the biggest fan of these one-reel musical shorts since for the most part there's not all that much that was done beyond putting the camera in front of the band and maybe having a pair of dancers or more. So it's everything else going on with Six Hits and a Miss that makes the short worth mentioning.