Posted 9:43 AM by Gene

Last night YouTube had me in a full nelson. The Web will occasionally remind you of its omnipresence and your infinitesimalism. There are vast piles of junk to machete through but then there are the little gems, the detritus of culture, that have you begging for more whatever their shortcomings, or YouTube's. Thus I witnessed Marilyn Miller in a largely two-strip-Technicolor excerpt from Warner's Sally, and another two-strip Technicolor excerpt (minus the soundtrack) from Paramount's Glorifying the American Girl, both projects involving the great Ziegfeld (or as NIKKI!!!!! would call him, "Zeigfield"). Watching these and other snippets from that era (including the remarkable "Lock Step" number from the aborted MGM extravaganza The March of Time, which some poster stole from the TWXSTERS) it is clear why the "all-singing-all-dancing" musical was doomed to failure, nearly dragging the Depression-era movie business down into the heap with it: everything is so incorrigibly stagebound (quite literally -- nearly every number has a proscenium arch), and devoid of any traits that would mark it as film; and the astonishing feats of terpsichore just blend one into another into a foggy roar; the rather dullish image and sound exacerbated by the Dalai Lamas of Mountain View don't help. Though I know I'd bore myself watching these films whole they exert a fascination in bits and pieces, and though these people may not always have had faces they had the talent; if only it weren't ahead of the technology -- the exact opposite of our time.