Here’s an extraordinary piece of musical filmmaking that really should be more celebrated than it is. It’s the big, fat, ultimate dance number from ‘The Gay Divorcee’ (1934), the second film to pair Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers and the first to be properly considered a starring vehicle for them.
I was listening to a Gilbert Gottfiried podcast while driving today in which he and his guests began extolling the remarkably varied talents of Jerry Lewis. Not only was he a comic, a director, a writer, a philanthropist but he was also…an excellent dancer? Well, sort of. It’s true that
Yesterday we watched a deeply strange BDSM musical number from a 1933 Eddie Cantor vehicle, staged by Busby Berkeley. Twenty-years later, the same mind that brought us slavegirls-on-parade came up with a fascinating, nightmarish concept for an Ann Miller number in ‘Small Town Girl’ (1953) called ‘I Gotta Hear That
As this week drifts on, we’re gradually getting away from my initial theme which was period football games captured on film. (This may well be a relief to some of you). Today we fall off the map completely with a terrific production number from the 1947 MGM remake of ‘Good
It may seem odd that by far my favorite of Fred Astaire’s dance partners is, in fact, not a dancer at all. But the above clip of Paulette Goddard and Astaire performing “I Ain’t Hep To That Step But I’ll Dig It” from “Second Chorus” (1940) rocks me every time
Let’s close this autumnal week with some madcap 1920s dancing featuring Joan Crawford. Above and below I’ve posted a few minutes from ‘Our Dancing Daughters’, the 1928 silent vehicle that officially launched Crawford’s career and world wide fame. Actually, calling the film ‘silent’ isn’t quite accurate as it was released
George Raft was a perfectly good actor but a great dancer as witness in the above clip from ‘Bolero’ (1934) where he dances with Carole Lombard. Raft began his career in New York in the so-called roaring twenties, first as the driver of prohibition kingpin gangster Owney Madden, then as
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIiZuAVZH4whttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SkYdsvgOpw Here are two videos demonstrating Bob Fosse’s stratospheric performance talent, which was largely ignored or forgotten once his stratospheric choreographing and directing talent erupted for all to see. Though he began as a performer, Fosse, always super show-biz savvy, must have seen that he was never going to be
This is pure YouTube at its best. Apparently knowing of my admiration for the opening sequence of ‘All That Jazz’ which I posted yesterday, YT dredged up this extraordinary seven minute reel of raw footage of Fosse directing that very sequence and greeted me with it this morning. It must
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2e9acreKmQ Behold the first six minutes of Bob Fosse’s 1979 ‘All That Jazz’, a paean to musical theater, dance, creativity, life and death. To my eyes, the film looks better and better over time but nothing beats the above sequence. Edited within an inch of its life, it tells in