Here’s a very valuable find. It’s a 1946 ‘March Of TIme’ newsreel featurette which does a deep-ish dive into the popular nightclubs of the day. It takes a full two minutes to get to the subject at hand–you might say the filmmakers buried the lead just a tad–but the meat of the story finally gets underway and we get a thorough and very interesting look at what it was to be a nightclub habitue in the era before television killed the evening out. Once they get through explaining the basics of the club experience is when things get really interesting. The second half shows us detailed footage of some of New York’s most historically important night spots–the El Morocco, The Stork Club, Cafe Society, among others. We even get glimpses of a few celebrity guests and columnists–Bert Lahr, Moss Hart, Otto Preminger, Leonard Lyons, Earl Wilson all make brief appearances. I stumbled upon this earlier today and note that quite a few of these MOT docs were made around the same time, one having to do with the record business. I’ll be eagerly digging into that one next…