Those Good Old Days

Those Good Old Days (1941)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

A grandfather (William T. Orr) is discussing the good old days of vaudeville when his granddaughter asks what those days were like. The pops then tells her three stories, which just happen to center around songs including My Old Shack in D-I-X-I-E, Dixie's Land, Who's Your Honey Lamb?, and Seaside Finale. Once again it's up to director Negulesco to put all these scenes together and get the crowd warmed up for whatever feature was about to follow. Griffith, DeMille and countless other directors have put their stamp on filmmaking but Negulesco has been forgotten to time, although you can look at his IMDb profile and see how many films like this he was turning out each year. He delivers a pretty good mixture of an old man looking bad on his younger days and the music numbers themselves aren't too bad. The film runs a quick 9-minutes so it's well worth watching if you come across it on TCM.