Good Morning, Eve! (Warner Bros., Vitaphone, 1934)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The short Turner Classic Movies ran on Sunday, November 1 right after The Garden of Eden was only tangentially related even though, unlike the feature film, it starts out in the real Biblical Garden of Eden. It was called Good Morning, Eve! and was the second in a series of 20-minute shorts made by Warner Bros. and the Vitaphone Corporation (Warners abandoned the sound-on-disc Vitaphone process in 1930 and started shooting sound-on-film like everyone else, but kept the trade name going through the end of the 1930’s for their band shorts) in 1934. Both this and the first Warner/Vitaphone short, Service with a Smile, were in three-strip Technicolor and were in fact the first live-action films made entirely in the process. (That honor is given in most film histories to another musical short, the Pioneer/RKO release La Cucaracha from 1934, but that was made after the two Warners shorts.) Directed by Roy Mack from a script by Cyrus Woods, Eddie Moran, and A. Dorian Otvos, Good Morning, Eve! is an audacious fantasy that begins in the Garden of Eden, though Adam (Leon Errol – and yes, it’s alternately amusing and annoying to imagine that the entire human race stemmed from the not-very-appealing physique of Leon Errol) and Eve (June MacCloy) are already wearing fig leaves even though they haven’t yet eaten the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. A papier-maché snake comes in to tempt them, and this sets them on a weird walking journey through several historical eras. Each of their time-travel visits is accompanied by a song by Cliff Hess.

First they stop off in ancient Rome under Emperor Nero (future Three Stooges nemesis Vernon Dent) – the film gives the year as “100 A.D.” even though Nero’s reign was from 37 A.D. to his suicide in 68 A.D. – for a song called “Rhythm in the Bow” featuring a quartet of violinists delivering a piece that veers between hillbilly and swing. Their next stop is at the court of King Arthur and his queen Guinevere (Arthur is unidentified on imdb.com but Guinevere is played by Maxine Doyle), where Adam interrupts and tries to referee a swordfight between Sir Lancelot (Bill Elllott) and Sir Gawain the Black Knight. After Lancelot wins the duel (though without causing the Black Knight’s arms to fall off and spurt blood as they did in Monty Python and the Holy Grail), he goes to greet Guinevere and there’s another big musical number, “Got There Just the Same.” Finally Adam and Eve end up in 1934 Florida, where under a bright blue sky (remember that the biggest single improvement in three-strip Technicolor over two-strip was that it could at last photograph blue, so early three-strip adopters went out of their way to show blue things, including sky and sea as well as a lot of blue clothes) a group of chorus girls play with beach balls and maneuver them in time to the music, more or less, of a song called “Lookin’ ’Em Over.” Then Adam and Eve wake up from their dream (yeah, that’s right, It Was All a Dream!) and turn out to be residents of “The Garden of Eden Nudist Colony.” Good Morning, Eve! was a cleverly staged vest-pocket musical fantasy that, like the feature film which preceded it, was engagingly cute and audacious in its imagination.