The Goldwyn Follies (1938)

The choreography for Vera Zorina and members of Balanchine's American Ballet Company combine pointe work with lyrical adagio movement that shows the influence of modern dance.
--Beth Genne on Balanchine's contributions to Goldwyn Follies (Astaire, Balanchine, Kelly and the American Film Musical, Oxford University Press 2018

Unless one is a fan of the Ritz Brothers or ventriloquist Edgar Bergen the only reasons to see The Goldwyn Follies are the fifteen minutes or so of choreography contributed by George Balanchine and the color cinematography of Gregg Toland in the relatively new three-strip version of Technicolor.  Otherwise the movie looks rather like a slightly demented version of The Ed Sullivan Show, full of vaudeville schtick and lacking only a juggler, with excerpts from La Traviata and bland versions of Gershwin songs sung by Howdy Doody lookalike Kenny Baker.

About thirty years ago I attended a series of lectures by Vera Zorina who showed excerpts from the film choreography that Balanchine did for her in a number of movies.  Seldom was Balanchine able to do precisely what he wanted to do; even Samuel Goldwyn did not allow his meticulously choreographed version of Gershwin's "American in Paris" because "the miners in Harrisburg would not understand it."  I wonder if they understood what remains in Goldwyn's film (nominally directed by George Marshall), the brief Romeo and Juliet as well as The Water-nymph. Both these ballets are too short but Balanchine had his own cinematic techniques of camera movement and placement, influenced by Busby Berkeley and Fred Astaire, to scores by Vernon Duke.  In Romeo and Juliet (William Dollar and Vera Zorina) the Montagues are tap and jazz dancers, the Capulets are ballet dancers on pointe and Balanchine moves the camera with the music and uses effective dissolves.  In the Water-nymph Vera Zorina was the unattainable romantic heroine who emerges from the water, waltzes with revelers, tempts a man and then returns to the pool from which she came.

Balanchine was never able to do what he wanted to do on film, as Zorina said,  though The Goldwyn Follies does indicate --in what was planned as well what was actually accomplished-- some of the directions he might have gone in if he had ever had the right opportunity with the right producer.