The Knight Is Young

June Allyson was a complete unknown at the time she did this short subject with dancer Hal LeRoy. When they meet she's daydreaming in her room and LeRoy is painting a sign across the street.

Allyson does a little dance and LeRoy breaks out in a soft shoe up on his scaffold Before this ends she's his date to the signpainter's union annual bash.

Some nice numbers, songs that are unknown except for a couple. All packaged quite nicely at Warner Brothers.

June (June Allyson) is trapped in her apartment. She fears leaving would allow the landlord to lock her out for back rent. Her singing attracts the attention of Hal (Hal Le Roy) who is painting an advertising mural of a knight across the way. This turns into a musical short with some singing and some dancing and lots of pretty girls.

This is early June Allyson. Hal Le Roy is doing his lackey dancing. The man is all legs and arms with a wacky face. I've never heard of Earlyne Schools and she sadly died tragically young. I am not sure about the black knight reveal. Maybe somebody will explain that to me, but I'm guessing that it's because he's black. Ignoring that, this short is perfectly harmless innocent musical fun.

This is a lame little short from Vitaphone (Warner Brothers) and it's mostly of interest because it stars a young June Allyson--before she became a star with MGM.

The film begins with Hal Le Roy butting up a new billboard and meeting Allyson in the apartment nearby. For pretty much no reason at all, Le Roy breaks into a tap dancing routine. Then, Allyson tells him she cannot leave her apartment because she's behind in the rent. She also tells him she talks to the men in the billboards (showing she might just be schizophrenic). However, he asks her to the sign painter's ball and brings a ladder so she can slip away undetected. Before he gets her, the sign DOES come to life and talks with her! At the ball, the god-awful singer who sang earlier in the film (uggh!!) sings another terrible song and the film ends after Allyson is told she is to be some new model for another billboard (just what every girl dreams of).

All in all, a bizarre and not particularly good film. Watching the film, it makes you a bit amazed that June Allyson EVER became a star based on this silly mess.

.. but Warner Brothers didn't recognize her! How ironic since they own the "A Star is Born" franchise now. This is a Broadway Brevity that has a thinly devised plot to showcase some musical talent. In this case that talent is Hal Le Roy. Warner Bros. gave him his own starring venue in 1934's "Harold Teen", but he didn't really have any compelling screen presence as an actor. So from that point until they released him, Hal made appearances in WB musical shorts as an eccentric dancer with his "rubber legs" style of dancing.

In this short it is "The Sign Painter's Ball" in which a 20 year old June Allyson plays Hal's date that is the excuse for the musical merriment. Yes, THAT June Allyson. Who wound up at MGM as not one of their biggest stars maybe, but a star nonetheless. And WB just let her go. The climax of this film are awards being handed out to "models of the year" - people who modeled for the signs that were painted by said sign painters. Sir Gallahad - painted on a sign across from her rented room - has been somebody on whom June Allyson has a crush, but when he reveals himself from inside his suit of armor, Allyson has a surprise in store.

Worth the watch just to see some early June Allyson, and the music is catchy too.

"The Knight is Young" is an MGM short of 1938 that accompanied a theater release of a feature film. I saw it on the DVD with MGM's "Best Foot Forward" of 1943. This short is a musical comedy that has some very good talent in the music and dance arenas.

Actor and dancer Hal Le Roy has the lead and does a couple of excellent tap and other dance numbers. The latter one is with a young June Allyson, who's just in her 8th short since beginning her film career the year before. Le Roy had a rather unusual dance style and was very adept at fast tap dancing rotating his feet back and forth behind one another. He made a couple dozen films - all but two by 1940, with two later appearances on TV. Most of his later career was back on the stage on Broadway and elsewhere.

Besides June Allyson, the short has Earlyne Schools as herself. She made only two movies and there's little to be found about her on IMDb or on the Internet. That's surprising because she had a fantastic voice in this film. One song was a classic and she could reach super high notes.

This short is very entertaining with some other dancers and a couple of choreographed numbers with a superbly coordinated dance troupe. There is a short scene that the DVD addresses in a written prologue before the film begins. Warner Brothers notes that the film reflects the culture of the time, but that it wrongly makes a derogatory racial slur.

This is one of many such shorts that MGM and all the major studios made in the 1930s to accompany feature films. Some of these showed little known entertainers of the time who were very talented.