MGM/UA Double Features With Day

MGM/UA home video has come up with one of the most consumer-friendly ideas yet in laser-disc packaging. Called the “MGM Double Feature Disc,” it serves up two movies spiced with an original theatrical trailer for $40.

It’s not that the movies are all so good. Many aren’t. But they look good, especially those struck from negatives made in the glory days of Technicolor, filled with those luscious reds and yellows that rival Crayola crayons.

Two typical double features offer a young Doris Day in her first three films making the jump from band singer to movie star. This isn’t the syrupy virgin of later years but the ingratiating starlet with the bouncy voice who toured the country with Les Brown and His Band of Renown.

Day’s first film, the 1948 “Romance on the High Seas” with the Oscar-nominated song “It’s Magic,” is coupled with her 1949 “My Dream Is Yours.” These glossy movies haven’t looked this good since they were first projected on the lot.

The lasers were mastered from 35-millimeter interpositives made from the original nitrate Technicolor negatives, with the sharply edged sound taken directly from the 35mm nitrate optical tracks. The plots are silly, the Michael Curtiz direction brisk, the songs familiar.

Besides Day, both films star the underrated Jack Carson. Supporting casts include some of Hollywood’s best--Oscar Levant playing Oscar Levant, Janis Paige, Don DeFore and S.Z. Sakall in “Romance”; Lee Bowman, Adolphe Menjou, Eve Arden and S.Z. Sakall, again, in “My Dream Is Yours.”

A welcome surprise in “My Dream Is Yours” is the live action/animated sequence created by Friz Freleng featuring Carson, Day and Bugs Bunny (“Freddy Get Ready” sung to Liszt’s Second Hungarian Rhapsody). All this 40 years before Roger Rabbit.

A second double feature pairs the 1949 Day film “It’s a Great Feeling” with the 1943 black-and-white “Thank Your Lucky Stars,” an all-star extravanganza that has to be seen to be believed. It features almost every star on the Warner lot. Among them: Humphrey Bogart acting scared; Errol Flynn dancing; John Garfield mugging with Eddie Cantor and trying to sing “Blues in the Night”; Olivia de Havilland and Ida Lupino singing and dancing a ludicrous pseudo-jive number, and Bette Davis stealing the show with Frank Loesser’s “They’re Either Too Young or Too Old.”

“It’s a Great Feeling” is a gentle spoof of the film industry with Carson and Dennis Morgan playing themselves, trying to make small-town waitress Day into a star. Along the way, Gary Cooper, Joan Crawford, Edward G. Robinson and Flynn offer funny cameos playing themselves. But for a 1991 audience, nothing is as funny as bits by Ronald Reagan, Jane Wyman and their very young, blond daughter Maureen Reagan.