Six Hits and a Miss

Jean Negulesco first rose to prominence as a director of Vitaphone musical shorts. Earlier efforts had been largely simply staged and shot, but Negulesco livened up the staid proceedings with moving cameras and frequent cuts. Here's one.

The title refers to the singing group of the same name. Rudolph Friml Jr. And his orchestra provide the music for the piece, and we soon find ourselves in Busby Berkeley territory, with an overhead camera showing off the dancers. It's pleasant, if a bit overproduced.

Six Hits and a Miss (1942)

*** (out of 4)

Six Hits and a Miss are actually a group but it's doubtful too many people will remember them today. They, along with The Dancing Colleens, are in the spotlight for this Vitaphone short, which is nine minutes of nice entertainment. Six Hits and a Miss sing "You Gotta Know How to Dance" while the Colleens' do the dancing. There were dozens, if not hundreds, of musicals like this one but I couldn't help but think of CITIZEN KANE while watching this thing. No, this isn't that great of a film or anywhere close to it but the movie is certainly very ambitious and I did wonder if director Negulesco was trying to bring some of that Welles flair to the movie. Just look at the various crane shots, scooping shots and just the overall camera movements. The music and dancing are always good in these films and that's the case here but more than that it was the visual style that really kept me entertained.

It's hard to believe there was a time in our movie culture when audiences would have been entertained by short films like this.

Six Hits and a Miss was apparently an actual singing/dancing group in the 1940s, and this film is just 10 minutes or so of them performing while complex dance numbers unfold on screen. It goes on and on, with no real differentiation between the songs or dances, so that everything blends together.

It was a surprise to me to see fairly big-time director Jean Negulesco at the helm of this. He must not yet have made the transition to feature director, but he would be responsible later in his career for films like "Johnny Belinda" and "Three Coins in the Fountain."

This is one of the newest of the Vitaphone shorts--known as a "Melody Master". These later musical shorts generally had been more straight forward and had simpler sets and no real story to tie it all together--just a famous band of the day doing their stuff. However, starting during the war years these shorts began to have a narrator and purported to give a bit of background on the band leader.

"Six Hits and a Miss" is very unusual for a Melody Master in that the film is not named after a band leader and he and his band are really NOT the stars of this short. The title refers to a rather dull septet--with five neat guys singing along with a lady. The film also features the Dancing Colleens. I must admit that this routine was pretty spectacular--like one from an old Busby Berkeley musical. However, when the couple dance, the tapping sound appears to have been provided by the band--not their shoes. Finally, you see Rudolf Friml Jr. and his band. Overall, one of the duller entries into the series and why they named the short after this group, I have no idea.

During Hollywood's Golden Age of the Studio System, each studio had its own department that made short subjects for theatrical distribution. These short subject departments did not receive big budgets to make their films. What they DID have was access to their studio's film vault, as well as access to their studio's collections of set pieces, props and costumes. So they could cobble together some pretty classy looking short films out of various odds and ends. This "Six Hits and a Miss" musical short subject is an unusually sophisticated example of this type of low budget recycling.

To save money, somebody decided to recycle the dance sequences from the finale of Ruby Keeler's 1936 musical, Colleen. This finale was really the standout piece from an otherwise run-of-the-mill film. This re-releasing of old musical numbers was also quite common during the pre-TV era, when old movies just sat in cans in a vault, gathering dust. But I guess it wasn't considered legitimate to just re-release these musical numbers as standalone films; these numbers had to be reframed with new content to make them seem fresh for modern audiences. Six Hits and a Miss was a very popular singing group that was really having a "moment" at this time, appearing in many feature films. So clearly, somebody thought it would be a good idea to feature them in this low budget project, possibly director Jean Negulesco himself. The vocal sound of Six Hits and a Miss blended well with the musical arrangements from the recycled dance sequences, which featured a lot of male chorus singing, so the two soundtracks could dovetail together seamlessly. It's really a very clever idea.

So somebody composed these new bridging sequences, brought in Six Hits and a Miss and the Rudolph Friml Jr group to pre-record the new musical tracks, and then filmed the bridging sequences in either an existing set from another film, or something cobbled together from odds and ends. That was one of the advantages of the factory system: a filmmaker had access to so many things that he could borrow for a few days to shoot his own project.

I'm honestly surprised that some reviewers were bored by this film. I thought it was delightful! The Colleen finale was choreographed by the great Bobby Connolly, who choreographed The Wizard of Oz. Granted, in 1936, Connolly was copying Busby Berkeley a lot, so this particular ensemble section is very much a 2nd rate Busby Berkeley knockoff. Still, it's quite watchable and lavish. And this finale was really one of Ruby Keeler's career-best dance numbers, partnered with the sophisticated stylings of Paul Draper, so there's a lot worth seeing. And the slightly edgier sound of Six Hits and a Miss paired with the Rudolph Friml Jr Orchestra make for some really rocking bridging material, in my opinion.

Overall, I thought this was a superior and quite entertaining repackaging of existing material; it's well worth seeing, if you get the chance. Assuming that you like swing music, of course!