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Gone to the Dogs (1939)

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clip 'The bow-wows now are all the rage'

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Clip description

George (George Wallace) leaps into song in the courtyard of Mrs McAllister’s dog kennel (and boarding house). Jean McAllister (Lois Green) whips off her skirt to join him, dancing in hotpants. Henry (John Dobbie) and a large cast of passers-by contribute to the high jinks, along with an array of canine friends – one of which appears to have the power of speech.

Curator’s notes

by Paul Byrnes

Ken Hall pulled out all the stops in this number – the most elaborately staged musical comedy sequence in any Cinesound film. There is very little onscreen music in the early Cinesound films, partly because it was difficult to record live music at Cinesound’s cramped Bondi Junction studios. That changed after The Broken Melody, at the beginning of 1938, in which Hall succeeded in squeezing 50 members of the Sydney Symphony and a couple of choirs into the studio.

Teaming up with George Wallace also appears to have stimulated Hall’s desire for more music, because Wallace was an entertaining singer. This sequence builds up considerable energy and comedy as it goes, in the manner of an MGM musical. Hall could never match the resources that Hollywood musicals had, but he does a brilliant job in this sequence at escalating the sense of fun and musical invention. Lois Green appears to be having a ball in her hotpants, and Wallace shows how light he was on his feet. Audiences usually went to live theatres to see this kind of show in the 1930s. Ken Hall appears in this routine to have been heading towards making a full-scale musical, but he never got there. Gone to the Dogs was released in Sydney in August 1939 – just before war broke out in Europe.

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