Further Prophecies of Nostradamus

..........or maybe its junque. Anybody who believes that Nostradamus was able to predict the the future is actually weak between the ears. His little jingles are just double talk, and it is all a real stretch to jump from what he wrote, to modern times. Do not waste your time. Most all of the stuff people claim nowadays were "predictions" are just situations where they twist his writings to fit some event that occurred in the last two centuries. This short subject does the very same thing, and I must say that whoever dreamed this stuff up must have spent thousand and thousands of hours working on it. Please do not waste your time. TCM sometimes shows this on television to fill a few minutes in their schedule, they should find some old Tom & Jerry cartoon in place of this stuff!

Further Prophecies of Nostradamus (1942)

*** (out of 4)

I was pleasantly surprised to see how much I enjoyed this entry in Carey Wilson's MGM series on various predictions by Nostradamus. I think this film works on one levels but fails on another but more on that later. What does work are the stories being told here as most of them deal with WW2 and the various stuff people believe was him pointing at Hitler, Japan and Germany (why didn't they read these before all the stuff actually happened?). The stories being told here are all rather entertaining but what the film doesn't do well is make you believe that Nostradamus could tell the future. We get a brief backstory where we learn about his wife and children and then we hear the predictions but they're told in a way where one new to the man would just roll their eyes and say that the "poem" could mean anything and you could decipher what's being said in countless ways and give it whatever meaning you'd like. Those who really believe in the man will probably be disappointed in the way the stories are told but if you don't take it too serious the film offers up 9-minutes worth of entertainment.

Carey Wilson, one of the most reliable of MGM's stable of writers, had a sideline in producing and narrating stories of history that relied on some far-fetched assumptions. Here we have one of several shorts he narrated about Michel de Nostradamus, cookbook writer, astrologer, and writer of cryptic poems which people have spent the last four or more centuries interpreting to foretell events.

Here, he stretches his assumptions to produces interpretations that seem to foretell Louis XIV's marriage, submarine warfare in the First World War, the rise of the Third Reich, and several events of the Second World War.

I don't find any of this in the least bit compelling.