Walt Disney’s MAKE MINE MUSIC, distributed by RKO, opened on Saturday, April 20, at the Globe. Disney was having financial difficulties in the 1940s. “Fantasia” had been a bomb with both critics and audiences when it was released in 1940 by Disney without the help of RKO. RKO distributed a shortened version as a B-feature in 1941 and 1942. Then a somewhat longer version went out to theaters in 1946, this time to better results. The cost and subsequent failure of “Fantasia” caused financial problems at Disney, which soon after lost many of its animators to the draft. During the war, the studio produced films for the government while continuing to turn out animated shorts but suspended work on full-length animated features.
“Make Mine Music” was an anthology of short animations like “Fantasia,” but this time it was set to music from pop artists like Dinah Shore, Benny Goodman and the Andrews Sisters rather than classical music. One segment originally set to Debussy was re-scored. The critics found the result hit and miss and generally not up to Disney standards. The audience agreed according to surveys conducted by Audience Research, a division of Gallup. The segments that got the most favorable critical attention were the two Benny Goodman segments; “Johnny Fedora and Alice Blue Bonnet,” about two hats that fall in love in a department store window, sung by the Andrew Sisters; and the bittersweet tale of “The Whale Who Wanted to Sing at the Met” sung by Nelson Eddy. Other notable segments include “Peter and the Wolf,” “Casey at the Bat” and “The Martins and the Coys.” Here is the "Johnny Fedora and Alice Blue Bonnet" segment,
Iconoclast James Agee would have none of it. “The best I can muster is a polite but nauseated smile,” he wrote in a hilariously snarky review in The Nation, accusing Disney of “tacky” taste that appealed primarily to rural audiences. In particular, Agee, whose father’s family were Tennessee hill people, found the hillbilly routine in “The Martins and the Coys” “infinitely insulting,” sadly noting that many hillbillies probably would find it entertaining. He thought the “pretty numbers” in the film made “tinted photographs of Aunt Eula and the Grand Canyon look as contemptibly inaccessible to the pure in heart as Van Gogh prior to his Department Store period.” “All the Cats Join In,” one of the Goodman bits, led him to worry that “next to a really thorough chain reaction, the best hope of the human race lies in segregation of the sexes up to the age of perhaps ninety.” According to his review in Time, he was okay with “The Whale Who Wanted to Sing at the Met” and “Johnny Fedora and Alice Blue Bonnet,” which he wrote is “sung with proper gentleness by the apparently muzzled Andrew Sisters.” While the film pulled in the family audience and Disney fans that week in New York, overall it had disappointing box office results.
THE WIFE OF MONTE CRISTO ended its run at the Globe this week. Debonair British actor John Loder, who combined playing lead roles in B films and occasional supporting roles in A films with a stage career, had top billing, playing the heavy in this costume drama from the bottom of the Poverty Row barrel, the Producers Releasing Company, or PRC (known to Hollywood wits as Prick). Loder was perhaps best known to the public in 1946 as Hedy Lamarr’s husband. Variety noted that this movie was a relatively high-budget effort for PRC, but was little more than a routine horse opera with a French accent. Yugoslavian actress Lenore Aubert had the title role and Hungarian Eva Gabor appeared in support. Edgar Ulmer, now a B-movie cult favorite, directed.