Till the Clouds Roll By (1946)

Suppose you were so boring that when Hollywood decided to make the movie of your life they had to add extra characters that never really existed just so you could be more interesting…?

Set to the music of Jerome Kern, Till the Clouds Roll By does exactly that. It opens with a very long rendition of Showboat, then jumps back to Kern’s days struggling to sell a tune in London. Almost immediately he does. After a brief and idyllic courtship starting with an unlikely breaking and entry to borrow the use of a piano, Kern marries his English rose and quickly ascends to Broadway. Then…, well…, we have another 60 minutes or so left in the film for a follies-esque presentation of his greatest hits strung together by a subplot of a young actress and family friend (played by Lucille Bremmer, a singing and dancing Bette Davis type) who learns the hard way she must make her own stardom to be successful…. Never mind this woman never existed, nor her father who is supposedly Kern’s manager and mentor.

It’s an unsurprisingly lackluster story. You wonder why they bothered at all seeing that the production numbers start coming rapid fire with star turns by Lena Horn, Judy Garland, Kathryn Grayson, Van Johnson, Tony Martin, Dinah Shore, and Frank Sinatra…. Each belts a verse or two before moving quickly along to the next star and the next song excerpt. Emerging dancer Cyd Charisse dances briefly in a curtain and chandelier environment. Angela Lansbury is a treat as a cockney tart in a swing, and Virginia O’Brien gets to deadpan a few bars of “A Fine Romance”. The whole thing culminates with skinny Frank Sinatra singing “Ol’ Man River” from a floating wedding cake in the sky!

It’s worth noting that Judy Garland plays Mary Martin who was busy playing herself that year in Cole Porter’s biopic Night and Day. Garland’s two numbers stand out from the film, one a wistful dishwasher singing “Look for the Silver Lining” (the Turner Classic Movies song); the other a big staircase and chorus boys dance number to “Who”, probably because they were directed by husband Vincente Minnelli. The two were about to become a regular production team — in fact, one of their most famous productions was already in the works: Garland was pregnant with their first child Liza Minnelli.