Mendelssohn's Wedding March

Here's another of the occasional musical shorts that James A. Fitzpatrick produced for MGM. He's best remembered for the enormous number of Technicolor travelogues he produced and narrated for MGM, but his earliest work was producing musical shorts for Pathe starting in 1925; presumably the house orchestra played appropriate accompaniment back in those days.

This one is a a fanciful extravaganza about Mendelssohn, shot in gorgeous Technicolor, with Mendelssohn's best-remembered music used both as background score and incidental pieces. The MGM lot never looked better than in this beautifully preserved piece that plays occasionally on Turner Classic Movies.

This short film was written, directed and produced by James Patrick and is a supposedly true story about the generosity of Felix Mendelssohn as well as the inspiration for his famous "wedding march". While I am certainly NOT an expert on the man, the entire piece strongly sounded like a complete work of fiction. Despite this, the film is reasonably entertaining and worth a peek, as it's a relatively early piece of Technicolor film AND the film is rather pretty to look at, as the color saturation is good and the people looked rather real.

Oddly, just before I saw this film, I saw Hollywood PARTY (1937)--another early MGM Technicolor short. However, unlike MENDELSSOHN'S WEDDING MARCH, the color was just grotesque--with over-saturated film and colors so vivid it made my eyes bleed. Thankfully, the process was perfected in the two years between the films.

Mendelssohn's Wedding March (1939)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

A pretty straight-forward bio-pic from MGM tells the story of Felix Mendelssohn, a name most won't know but his immortal "Wedding March" is perhaps the best known music ever written. This film tells the story of how he came to write the music and the reason behind it. I don't know a thing about Mendelssohn or his life but for some strange reason nothing I watched here jumped out at me as being true history. Either way, the film is decent enough as a 8-minute time killer but it's certainly nothing deep or overly special. I think the main reason to watch the film is for its Technicolor, which really looks amazing. The film almost looks like a dream as the colors are so beautiful and you'll see how much so in the opening sequence. The greens really jump off the screen and these brief scenes really make the film worth viewing. As for everything else, FitzPatrick handles the material fairly well but he really doesn't do anything special with it. Mary Anderson is the standout here as the woman who will be getting married.

The three previous reviewers try to guess at why MGM might have made this short, and conclude that it was perhaps to show off Technicolor.

Perhaps.

But the very clear reason this movie was made in 1939, as Hitler devoured central Europe, was to show that Jews had done great things and would, therefore, be worth fighting to save. Why else would the beginning of this short film remind us that Mendelssohn, the composer of the famous Wedding March, was Jewish???? (He was born into a family of Jewish heritage, true, but raised as a Lutheran. He wrote some of greatest of all Lutheran church music.)

Hollywood worked tireless for what was called The War Effort. This is just one small example of it. The best known example is, of course, Warner Brothers' *Casablanca*.