Two Hearts in Wax Time

When a department store custodian gets drunk, the short follows a night of hallucinating that the mannequins are alive.

The musical ditty itself isn't very distinguishable from others of the era, although the "Greatest Menace Of Them All" bit is almost surreal it's content. Think of a preemptive to Herman Munster & The Penguin and you've got an idea of the 'menaces'.

At 17 minutes, it's hard to take offense to the short, even if you don't like musicals. But the bookends about the alcoholic department custodian is at least a different approach to the musical genre set-up.

6/10

Although the musical interludes are on shaky ground, they're a lot better than what usually was done by the '30s Warner "Brevities" at another studio. In fact, a lot of imagination and creativity went into the making of this MGM short about an inebriated custodian of wax window models who sees them all come to life.

GUS SHY is a vaudevillian who does his drunken act well, but the accent here is on what he sees once the window displays come alive. Especially interesting are "The Greatest Villains" featuring a very striking use of the Frankenstein creature, bearing a strong resemblance to Boris Karloff in the old Universal film.

The songs are a weak lot but the imagination goes into the various antics of the live wax mannequins who go from window to window experiencing different settings and interacting with the various characters.

Summing up: Inventive use of early Technicolor makes watching it worthwhile.

A man who carries the mannequins around for the window dressers at a department store gets drunk and imagines the dummies come to life.

It's a typically bizarre MGM Technicolor short from this period, starting with a title that suggests 1934's TWO HEARTS IN WALTZ TIME, and goes on to have several musical numbers in the store window. Although the minor players are named, no director was credited. Perhaps the set and costume design, selected to show off three-strip Technicolor was the reason; the copy that plays on Turner Classic movies is bright, clean, and features a lot of lavender tints.

MGM would soon realize that the shorts department was a good place to give aspiring directors a chance to show what they could do. For the moment, though, it often appeared that the stranger the choice, the more likely it was to be made at 20 minutes or less.

This has to be the most surreal and downright bizarre and downright strange and, these words all mean the same thing but the problem is there's no way to explain just how insane this insane short film is...

Shown on TCM between HERE COMES MR JORDAN and NIGHT OF THE HUNTER, two movies that are strange enough, this short film was obviously an influence of Night at the Museum... that is, if anyone was able to see this strange short that seems like it would be playing in a portal in hell...

The drunk guy hullucinating all the famous wax figures coming to life, from Charlie Chan to Frankenstein, looks like the Wizard from The Wizard of Oz, and then there are dancers singing the kind of musical numbers that are a thing of flu dreams...

TCM should never play this again.

I guess the only thing you can call Two Hearts In Wax Time as a genre is a Musicalette. I'm sure the paying customers of the movie-going public enjoyed it back in the day.

The film seems mainly to be a vehicle for the talents of Gus Shy who was a vaudevillian of some note and this was his next to last film appearance. Shy rivaled Ed Norton and Vince Barnett for playing inebriates on film. He's a custodian in a department store and while on a toot he sees the mannequins in the window come alive and do a few songs and dances.

Such folks as Shirley Ross, Syd Saylor, and Sam McDaniel who had some substantial film credits are in this as well. It's an easy to take musical short or Musicalette if you prefer.