The Ice Follies of 1939 (1939)

Absolutely the worst movie.

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

If you are watching this movie expecting a great melodrama starring two stars and with an interesting plot then you will most probably be disappointed. It is not a great film with great script and great performances but mainly a skating show with a variety of skating numbers performed by the ice skating stars of the International Ice Follies to compete with Sonja Henie's skating musicals from rival studios. And because of that and despite of, the film contains a poor plot but beautiful and creative skating numbers; among the bests of them is the indian one (containing beautiful ice skating angel figure in its beginning) and the spicy red riding hood one in the technicolor sequence at the end of the film. Sadly, camera angles to take the skating routines are not always the best to film skaters in action, on the contrary to what happened in Henie's films. It is a pity that the studio did not include some skating routines for the three main characters, specially considering that all of them play professional skaters and that James Stewart & Lew Ayres appear in skating suits in a promocional still that can be seen in the movie as a poster in their room. By the way, the cinderella big blue ball gown in the final technicolor sequence must have been the inspiration for recent cinderella movie dress.

Released in 1939--that golden year of Hollywood cinema--"The Ice Follies of 1939" was up against some really great films. What a shame it turned out to be a clunker.Take Joan Crawford and Jimmy Stewart as a married couple who spend little time together due to separate careers. Give them a dialogue that does little to create romantic tension, and feels like a collection of scenes strung together. Add some ice skating scenes that lack a star like Sonja Henie to draw the viewer into the action. And what you get is disappointment. (By the way, the skating is proficient for its time, but very dated by today's standards.)At the end of the film is a transition from B&W to Technicolor. It is nothing more than a gimmick, unlike the use of color in "The Wizard of Oz", which would be released about five months later. The ending also features a cringe-worthy "no place like home" sellout by the Joan Crawford character, who abandons her career with nary a second thought.

This is one of those horrible films that sounds so bizarre it holds the promise of actually being good in a bad way when one finally finds it on television. It doesn't deliver on any level, though. The whole notion of Stewart and Crawford as ice skating stars is hilarious. But they are never really shown skating at any point in the film. What's left is a hackneyed, contrived plot about them falling in love and then separating to follow their careers. He tries to create the first Ice Follies and she (quite easily!) becomes a major film star. The actual Ice Follies troupe shows up in the middle of the film to do a few twirls and spins. The whole thing is capped by a 3-strip Technicolor finale featuring massive quantities of skaters and Joan in a humongous ball gown singing a forgettable song. It's so rare to see early Joan in color, yet she is given no close-ups. Joan was supposed to sing three songs in the film, but two of them were cut. She dons a black Hedy Lamarr-style wig for a lot of the film which gives her a distinctive, if not natural for her, look. Even though the film is ludicrous and trite, money WAS spent on it. The banquet scene in which Crawford gives a speech is lavish in it's decor and her clothes, though often bizarre, are also expensive. (One scene has her in a kooky art deco headdress which makes her look like a parking meter come to life.) This film is of note these days primarily because it's the film "Joan" is being made up for at the beginning of "Mommie Dearest". If not for that plug, it may have fallen into even greater obscurity than it already was. One of her hilarious recollections from the book Conversations with Joan Crawford was, "Christ! We all must have been out of our collective minds!" She describes how she and Stewart "skated around on our ankles". She tried to inject some flair and life into the film, but it was doomed on the page. Fortunately, "The Women" was on the horizon to keep her in good stead.

This MGM musical was one of the reasons Joan Crawford was labeled box-office poison in the late 30s. After two other big flops "The Bride Wore Red" (1937) & "The Shining Hour" (1938), she starred in this dry and tiresome musical, with her playing ex-skater who becomes a famous Hollywood actress. Look out for the peculiar Technicolor finale on ice! Two stars here.