Nostradamus IV

Nostradamus IV (1944)

** (out of 4)

A somewhat strange entry in MGM's series that took a look at the life and career of Nostradamus. This one here starts off with Kay Williams walking into the sound stage where narrator Carey Wilson is working. She shows him a newspaper headline saying "Mussolini Kicked Out" and then we flashback to a previous short, FURTHER PROPHECIES OF NOSTRADAMUS, that claimed the master predicted this happening. We then get a small bio of Nostradamus predicting an eclipse when he was young and then we look at possible proof of what will end up happening to Hitler. These MGM shorts are all interesting in one way or another but at the same time I think a lot of them go against Nostradamus. This one here predicts that Hitler would have his throat slit by someone close to him but of course this ended up not happening. I don't blame the film for getting this wrong but nothing here is overly interesting. The flashback to the previous film didn't do much and neither did the science clip since previous films did a much better job talking about his early life.

Carey Wilson offers another of his shorts in which he speaks about the strange and mystic powers of Nostradamus' ability to predict what would happen four hundred years later, and to phrase it so vaguely that no one could figure it out until after it actually happened.

Many of the shorts that one of MGM's best staff writers narrated were about various mystical or unlikely things, fit subject for FATE magazine when I was a youth, full of UFOs, ghosts, people bursting into flames for no reason, and strained interpretations of Nostradamus' quartrains. In other reviews of his shorts about the seer, I have mocked Wilson's insistence on unlikely and meaningless theories about history. In this one, he pushes it to the limit and beyond.

Well, at least the MGM starlet who appears with Wilson is pretty.