Dancing on the Ceiling (1937) User Reviews

I think the folks at MGM were stoned when they made this one!!

[planktonrules · 4/10 · 4 September 2017]

"Dancing on the Ceiling" begins with a guy following a lady. She ducks into an office and he follows...not realizing he's just walked into the strangest dental office on the planet!! It's like a combination dentist and Busby Berkeley production number. However, the dancing and especially the acting are amazingly wooden. Eventually, the female dentist gives the guy gas and he has some weird hallucinations about everyone being upside down and dancing on the ceiling!! At the end, he asks for more gas!!

This is a must-see film...not because it's good (it's not) but because it's so utterly strange! You just have to see it to believe it. And, it makes you wonder about the people who made the short, especially since it seems like they are endorsing the use of recreational laughing gas!!

Competition Between Dentists Must Be Rough

[boblipton · 6/10 · 4 May 2019]

Murray Roth's last credit as a director is one of those insane musical shorts that MGM produced in this period. A masher follows Mary Jo Mathews into her place of business. It turns out she's a dentist who employs a line of chorines and offers her patients drinks. During a couple of production numbers, the fellow is given 'gas' -- presumably ether to knock him out -- at which point the editor uses optical printing to show the chorus line dancing on the ceiling.

MGM seems never to have gotten the hang of doing these outrageous production numbers that Busby Berkley seemed to manage so frequently at Warners. Therefore, eventually they hired him, just at the time that Arthur Freed's unit was beginning to click at doing better book musicals on their own.

Even so, the sheer, unselfconscious ludicrousness of this short is quite engaging.

Musical dentistry

[bkoganbing · 5/10 · 4 May 2019]

This short subject from MGM is a passably good short musical about a man who pursues a pretty girl to a dentist's office and discovers this place is the Busby Berkeley School of Dentistry. All women who look like chorus girls at the office and this guy thinks he arrived in heaven.

I thought I would be seeing and hearing the Rodgers&Hart classic Dancing On A Ceiling in this film. Disappointed there, but this is an amusing bit of fluff.

Pointless mini-musical short is clumsily executed...

[Doylenf · 5/10 · 29 April 2008]

You have to wonder, what were they thinking? Here we have a musical short that turns out to be about a woman dentist and her all female staff of briefly attired technicians dealing with a man who claims he has a loose tooth that requires immediate attention. He ends up given gas while they go to work on him--all for a fee of $10.

Very quaint. When was the last time you spent $10 at the dentist? It's more than quaint. It's clumsily executed with no real grace or style, the highlight being a song called "Dancing on the Ceiling" which he imagines when he's under treatment, and another little ditty called "See Your Dentist Once A Day".

Summing up: Harmless but pointless with silly plot device poorly executed.

An enjoyable musical short

[SimonJack · 7/10 · 16 February 2017]

This MGM short is called a tabloid musical. Many of the big stars in the early decades of Hollywood got their start in movie shorts. Technically, a short is any film under 40 minutes; but shorts ran the gamut from a few minutes to the limit. I've seen many on older films that ran six to 10 minutes, but few that ran much over 20 minutes.

"Dancing on the Ceiling" is just nine minutes, but it is an entertaining nine minutes. The IMDb cast lists has only four people, three of them uncredited. But it has a large ensemble, especially of women in the dance numbers. I wonder if there were any dancers or singers in this short who went on to make a name for themselves on the silver screen. Or, possibly one of the several men in the dental chairs.

Dr. Suzette Welling (Mary J. Mathews) is a dentist who has a large male clientele. They just may be attracted to her practice by the bevy of beauties she has as dental assistants.

This isn't top caliber song and dance, but it's quite good and entertaining for a second tier of the wannabes in the wings at MGM. I enjoy catching these old featurettes on DVDs with major films, for which they were audience warm-ups in the days of original theater releases. This one happens to be quite good. It's a fairly elaborate production for a film under 10 minutes.

Different..That's For Sure

[Michael_Elliott · 30 May 2009]

Dancing on the Ceiling (1937)

** (out of 4)

Minor musical short from MGM has got to have one of the silliest set ups in film history. A man with a loose tooth walks into a dentist office and sees that the dentist is a woman as is all of her assistance. They give him some gas and then it's off to the music as a big dance hall breaks out. The entire gimmick is that the songs and dance moves are built around what you would see or do at a dentist office. This includes teeth pulling items, gas and various other goodies. This film certainly isn't any good because the direction of the musical numbers are rather bland and the songs are weak but at the same time I couldn't take my eyes off the screen because you never knew what was going to happen next. This isn't a film you should seek out but if you come across it on TCM and have nine-minutes to kill you might want to give it a quick peak.

Ugh.

[KlutzyGirl · 1/10 · 30 January 2011]

The one weak part of the lovely "Myrna Loy and William Powell Collection" (Manhattan Melodrama / Evelyn Prentice / Double Wedding / I Love You Again / Love Crazy) is the special features of each disc. Most feature a bad cartoon and a Pete Smith short (I can't stand Pete Smith's voice or sense of "humor"). Double Wedding has this short instead. I watched hoping for something akin to Astaire in Royal Wedding, but this was done long before the technique was developed and just flips the film upside down. The plot is basically a whorehouse of dentistry, and done badly at that. Pete Smith would have been preferable!

Decent musical/comedy curio from MGM in the 30's!

[talisencrw · 7/10 · 17 August 2016]

This was a decent musical/comedic short that was an extra on my 'Double Wedding' DVD, disc 3 of my 'TCM Spotlight: Myrna Loy and William Powell Collection'. Though it definitely utilizes the poor-boy version, or the second fiddles, of the studio's song-and-dance division, I had no trouble with it. I wouldn't have specifically paid to watch something of this resolutely mediocre quality, but seeing it as a free extra tacked on wasn't bad. It's short and sweet and gives one a different look at what a musical number from the period, either on Broadway or in film, would be like. Glad I spent a few minutes watching this little curio from four generations ago.