Ding Dong Williams

Ding Dong Williams (1946)

Ding Dong Williams, a clarinet player who can neither read nor write music is employed at a motion picture studio. The studio plans to use him and his six-piece band but his musical deficiencies are discovered and the plan scrapped. But the secretary of the head of the music department intercedes on his behalf and he is given a chance in the film.

Date of release
1946-04-15
TMDB
7.5 / 10 (3)
Runtime
1h 1m
Genres
Comedy, Romance, Music
Director
William Berke

Casting

Interesting facts

Ding Dong Williams is a 1946 American comedy film directed by William Berke. The film stars Glen Vernon, Marcy McGuire, Felix Bressart, Anne Jeffreys, and James Warren. It was released on April 15, 1946 by RKO Radio Pictures.

Production

Ding Dong Williams was based on a series of stories by Richard English, published in Collier's magazine, chronicling the comic adventures of a young musician. The musical-comedy script was assigned to Brenda Weisberg, who excelled in teenage stories (she initiated Universal's Little Tough Guys series and wrote for Columbia's Rusty series) and M. Coates Webster, a specialist in stories for "B" musicals.

Ding Dong Williams was filmed in 1945 as a vehicle for RKO's promising young star Glenn Vernon. The studio had cast Vernon opposite its resident rambunctious teenager Marcy McGuire in the B comedy Sing Your Way Home, and hoped to create in Vernon and McGuire a musical-comedy team like Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland.

Although Ding Dong Williams never became a series, it did inspire a spinoff series. In Ding Dong Williams James Warren played a slow-witted movie cowboy with a palomino horse called Star Dust. RKO had been making Zane Grey westerns with Robert Mitchum in the leading roles, but with Mitchum advancing to dramatic features, Ding Dong Williams producer Herman Schlom remembered how well Warren had photographed in western gear.

Ding Dong Williams was the only motion picture credit for 11-year-old concert pianist Richard Korbel (December 27, 1933 – January 13, 2013). He returned to the concert stage, and in 1949 the 15-year-old Korbel gave a recital at Carnegie Hall after an absence of three years.

Ding Dong Williams proved to be a convenient film for RKO to program wherever a musical attraction was needed. It was still playing profitably as a first-run feature in July 1947, as reported in Variety by a Los Angeles correspondent: "Ding Dong Williams is being pushed to a fancy $25,000 [for the week] at the Million Dollar theatre due to power generated by Cab Calloway's orch [sic] on stage."

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

Recommended