The Best of Everything
Encyclopedia
Entry
Great
Day!
Click here
to see photos from the film.
Unreleased MGM musical. Shooting began
around September 1930; after 8 weeks or so, the picture was abandoned.
Cast: Joan
Crawford, Johnny Mack Brown, John Miljan, Anita Page, Marjorie Rambeau.
Credits: Based
on the 1929 Broadway play by Vincent Youmans. Director: Harry Beaumont.
Producer: Irving Thalberg.
Early announcement
of film (4/28/1930
by Elizabeth Yeaman in the Hollywood Daily Citizen):
Harry Pollard, who screened Show Boat, Uncle Tom's Cabin, and other
stories of the South, will direct Joan Crawford in The Great Day, a
current stage hit. The play by William Cary Duncan and John Wells will
be made with a Mississippi River background on the MGM lot. The song
hits, "The Great Day," "Without a Song," and negro spirituals from the
original Vincent Youmans score, will be included in the screen
version. In this romance, Joan will play the part of a roadhouse
entertainer, who has been reduced from a position of aristocracy,
through the flooding of family plantations by the rising of the river.
New Orleans race tracks and a mardi-gras carnival will supply colorful
sequences. Pollard, who makes his debut with MGM in this picture, has
been identified with the screen since 1910, directing the original
Leather Pusher series which elevated Reginald Denny to stardom.
IMDb
page.
Sandy
McLendon article on why the film was never completed.
Sheet
Music:
The Best of Everything