2.4 /10 1 Votes2.4
Distributed by MGM Country United States Initial release 1930 Producer Irving Thalberg | 2.4/10 IMDb Release date Unreleased Cinematography Charles Rosher | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Directed by Harry BeaumontHarry Pollard Cast Similar Brown of Harvard, Are You Listening?, Forbidden Hours, A Single Man, Unashamed | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Great Day is an unfinished 1930 American Pre-Code musical film, which was to star, in alphabetical order, Johnny Mack Brown, Joan Crawford, John Miljan, Anita Page, Marjorie Rambeau and John Charles Thomas.
Overview
Great Day began as a Vincent Youmans musical purchased by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to be tailored to Crawford's talents. The 1929 show had not been a success on Broadway, lasting only twenty-nine performances. But its songs — with lyrics by Billy Rose and Edward Eliscu — were memorable, including the title tune, another called "Without a Song" and "More Than You Know". It was the popularity of the music that encouraged MGM to buy the rights for the film version.
Production started in the fall of 1930, but after around eight weeks of shooting, the film was scrapped at considerable cost to the studio — $280,000 — largely due to Crawford's extreme unhappiness with her "Southern belle" performance ("Southern drawl I can do, but I just can't talk baby talk," Crawford told Louis B. Mayer after viewing the rushes, which she thought were "God-awful".)
The studio and Crawford mutually decided to go into major rewrites to save the film with the plan to go back to shooting with the newly revised script by the following year, in 1931. It never happened, and Great Day was never released. Another effort was made to make the film in 1934, this time starring Jeanette MacDonald, but this also fell through.