Movies Til Dawn

In honor of tomorrow being Halloween, I've decided to discuss and post scenes from one of the greatest (and most frequently overlooked) musicals of the so-called golden age, Vincente Minelli's "The Pirate", starring Gene Kelly and judy Garland. What has "The Pirate" to do with Halloween? Simple. My son is being a pirate for Halloween. "The Pirate", with a score by Cole Porter, was released in 1948 and an aura of disappointment immediately descended over it, one that the film has yet in some ways to shake. Widely considered to be over-indulgent and somehow not up to MGM's highest standard, it has remained on the backburner with musical enthusiasts over the years. For my money, it is infinitely superior to the overrated "An American In Paris" (Kelly and Minelli again, this time with Gershwin music) and contains some of both the director and the stars most impressive work. It's certainly superior to the other Kelly/Garland collabor...

Below are parts one and two of the Three Stooges 1935 film "Three Little Beers" --one of their best early efforts (this was the tenth Columbia short they made) as well as a wonderful look at some old Los Angeles streetscapes. Briefly--the plot. They work as delivery guys for a beer company. They decide to enter a golf tournament. They bust into a private club to practice their golf and screw everything up. Then they escape in their truck and send barrels of beer tumbling all over the place. See, that didn't take long. What I like about this early Stooge effort is the director, Del Lord's (a former Mack Sennett director and stunt driver) leisurely pace with the golfing material. Lord could also make his Stooge movies move like wildfire, but the outdoor setting and the improvisitory nature of the golf sequence lends itself to a pacing slightly more akin to Laurel and Hardy than the Stooges. And where do we suppose this golf course actually was? I have to assume we'...

Here is part two of The Three Stooges In "Women Haters" (1934). Things to look for: According to Wikipedia (and, as we know, they've been known to make things up) the first "Nyuck, Nycuk" ever from Curley is delievered at about the sixteen minute mark of the movie (which in this segment would be around five/six minutes). And the denoument on the train is worth examining--Marjorie White sits in the boys berth and claims that the piece of paper that binds them as members of the Woman Haters club is null and void because "everybodys cheated, I can prove it and I know--move over!" Moe then shouts "Move over?" and he and Curley tumble out of the train window. Is her presence on the bed (and the threat that she will "prove" her dominant sexuality) and their horror of this agressivness suggestive of her preparing to sexually entrap all three of them at once? ("I can prove it...") And is such a thought--a Stooge menage a foursome-...

Below is part one of the first official "Three Stooges" Columbia short film, the one and only "Women Haters". It also remains my favorite for a variety of odd reasons (not the least of which being that it has it's own Wikipedia page. My God, do the other 189 Columbia Stooge shorts have them as well? I'm scared to look..) First of all, the damn thing is a complete miniature musical--the dialogue is sung, not spoken, entirely in rhyme. The Stooges never made another one of these--the vogue for the "musical novelty" format died down, I guess, as quickly as it sprang up--and thus "Woman Haters" remains a singular feat in Stoogeonomy--their only musical (though the form is really more sung-through operetta). Secondly, the movie is, for me, a time capsule of my own youth--circa 1972. You see, as a kid I got a tape recorder for my seventh or eighth birthday and quickly began tape-recording everything in sight--my parents conversations, music o...

From the sublime (the Nicholas Brothers) to the not only ridiculous but downright grotesque--ladies and gentleman, I give you the Three Stooges. How mothers across America (mine included) allowed little kids to watch this crap unsupervised I'll never know. And why aren't there more forty-something year olds wandering around missing an eye, or with half their noses cut off? So obsessed was I with the Stooges that at age nine I began writing a book about them--carefully taking photos of their movies off our black and white Zenith TV, on which I watched--every afternoon at five PM--a full hour of their debased, ultra-violent 'humor', offered up by the strange independent station from Corona, Channel 52. (The book was never completed. Could it be that this weblog is an attempt to pick up from where I left off, thirty some years ago?) In spite of my better judgement, however, I still love the Three Stooges--even though, in recent years, repeated attempts to watch the shorts ...

Here is a wonderful addition to Nicholasiana (aka "all things Nicholas Brothers"). It's a little number called "Lucky Number" featuring the boys when they are truly "boys"--this is either from their Vitaphone Short "Pie Pie Blackbird" (1932) or from "Big Broadcast of 1936." In other words, Fayard is either eighteen or twenty two years old, and Harold is either eleven or fifteen years old! (He looks eleven, though he always had the baby-face thing happening.) Actually, the more I study this, the more obvious it's from 1932--the setting, the style of the arrangement and the sheer youth of the two brothers. So is this from the Vitaphone Short? I note on user comments on IMDB a mysterious mention of a second Vitaphone short which they presumably made around the same time as "Pie Pie Blackbird" but which does not appear in their IMDB filmography. Could this be from that? Anybody who can clear this up, please feel free to d...

Fred Astaire thought their "Jumpin Jive" climax in "Stormy Weather" (see 10/9 post) the greatest tap dance number ever filmed. Balanchine and Barishnikov also claimed them as among their top picks as greatest dancers ever. Gregory Hines said that if they ever made a biopic about them they'd have to use computer generated effects since nobody could possibly copy them. So who were these Nicholas Brothers? Fayard Nicholas (his first name sounds like the birth certificate guy at the hospital mis-heard a different name--perhaps "Theodore"?) and Harold Nicholas (his younger brother) were self-taught show-biz kids from the south, first watching dancers perform in vaudeville shows in Philadelphia during the 1920's in which their father played drums and their mother played piano. Fayard got the idea of putting together an act. Harold went along with it. Somehow, they developed their own extraordinary style--part tap, part swing. part eccentric dancing, pa...

Having watched enough clips now from "Stormy Weather" (and being constitutionally indisposed toward disagreeing with myself) I'm more convinced than ever that a rewrite of the SW screenplay--one in which Bill "Bojangles" Robinson is Lena Horne's long lost tap-dancing legend father (rather than her cast-aside would-be lover) -- would have elevated the film's status from near-miss (albeit with lots of great numbers) to pseudo-classic--not "Singing In The Rain", mind you, but certainly in a league with, say, "Cover Girl" or "The Bandwagon." Check out the two clips below. The first is footage (don't know from what) of Robinson performing his famous "step dance" to "Swannee River." It's a brilliant routine (the youtuber who posted it says it was shot in 1932) that really could have been performed back at the turn of the century, when Robinson was a young man starting out in vaudeville (he was born in ...

His Armstrong's are on the money, and you can't igg the drape, especially that outrageous orchestration. Before we final this "Stormy Weather" blap, let's slide the jib about Cab Calloway's trickeration... For a translation of the above jive into English, click here. Then, enjoy Cab's solo moment from "Stormy Weather", the marvelous "Geechy Joe", a veritable master class in the art of "zoot". Few perfomers can reach Cab's heights of uninhibitedness, of near-rapture while maintaining his ineffable cool, his deep groove. He was a curiously overlooked jazz great (no doubt the icky's had their glasses on because of his immense celebrity and showmanship) but he kept working well into his eighties--he was all business, running his band like the cottage industry it was, writing his own material and keeping his name, image and routine in front of the public years after the vogue for his style had died away. Once, as I recall...

We interrupt this "Weather" broadcast to bring you the kick-ass trailer of my new documentary, "Tis Autumn: The Search For Jackie Paris", which opens on December 7 in New York City (and elsewhere, after, we hope). Since I didn't edit this trailer myself, I'm free to say how thrillingly effective I find it. Hope you do as well...

Our topic today is the rewrite of the libretto (aka SCRIPT) of "Stormy Weather". Click that last link and you'll read an unusually good wikipedia entry on this movie, giving you all the background you might need. Or read my post from yesterday... The plot, such as it is, has to do with Bill Robinson (uninventively named Bill Williamson in the movie) returning home from World War 1 and launching a career as a dancer. Along the way he falls in love with beautiful, young "Selina" (Lena Horne--doesn't this stuff with the names feel very first-drafty?) who's a singer and who won't "settle down". They run into each other over the next twenty (?) years and finally get together. Fade out. The first problem with the film comes from the very obvious age difference between the stars. Robinson was born in 1878, making him sixty-five at the time the film was shot. Horne was born in 1917, making her twenty-six. Forty years age difference between the ...

In the land of grand missed opportunities, no movie musical comes quite so close to being admitted to the pantheon and misses quite so sadly as Andrew L. Stone's 1943 "Stormy Weather". Given the excess of talent and the brilliance of a half dozen numbers, this "what might have been" scenario joins such heady heartbreaking company as the 2000 Presidential election, the New York Jets loss to the New York Giants last Sunday, the man who interviewed Hitler for a college magazine in 1934 (believe it was Yale) and could have taken the opportunity to murder him...and on, and on... One of the key shames of the greatest single period of American cultural history (I of course refer to the nineteen-twenties, thirties and forties) is that the endemic racism of the time prevented the visual documentation of so many of the greatest black entertainers. Recently, obscure "soundies" (movies made for jukebox viewing), considered at the time to be nothing if not dispen...

Even Irving Berlin must have realized that the Harry Richman "Putting On the Ritz" performance (see 10/1 post--if you dare) was simply not going to cut it as the songs official movie appearence. In the 1940's, Berlin concocted a story idea for a film that would encompass a large chunk of his song catalogue (he'd done this once before--1938's "Alexanders Ragtime Band"). The resulting film, "Blue Skies" (1946) stars Fred Astaire and Bing Crosby and contains one of the truly sublime Astaire screen moments. Yes, it's "Putting On the Ritz" and this version will make you smile forever. Things to watch for: how terribly relaxed--yet seething--Astaire is through the first chorus, with the energy of a panther waiting to strike. And how does he get the cane to do what it does at 2:58? Finally, the mirror routine which closes the number. Double exposure? Rear screen projection? I honestly don't know and would love the answer. By the wa...

As an antidote to the new "musical razzies" feature on Movies Til Dawn (let's face it: how much negativity can any of us take even when it makes you laugh?), I've decided to post alternate versions of the songs featured in the previous "WORST PRODUCTION NUMBERS EVER FILMED" entries. In reverse order, let's start with a great version of Cab Calloway's "Minnie The Moocher"--as performed by Cab and his band in a wonderful Betty Boop cartoon from 1931. It runs seven minutes and you won't regret the time spent with it. So pour a coffee (or a drink--I'm no moralist) and enjoy this surreal and wonderfully perverse animation. Things to look out for: Not only do they frame the song with "St. James Infirmary" but they manage to work in the then-new hit song "Don't Blame Me" for a few bars. Also, Betty's horrible parents, seen at the beginning, appear to be Germans. Were the Von Boop's based on the Fleishe...

Grace Moore, a phenomenally popular opera star of the twenties and thirties (many of those years with the Metropolitan Opera--she was perhaps the most famous "Mimi" of the day) was also a film star of brief but significant note. As you can see by clicking here on the ever popular Wikipedia article, she was nominated for an Academy Award for something called "One Night Of Love" and made a handful of films for Columbia in the mid to late thirties. Alas, this was the era of the dreadful "swing it professor!" novelty tunes--where classics were jazzed up, stuffy pince-nezed types were seen cutting loose and trucking on down, and classical musicians were suddenly inspired to play boogie-woogie (Jose Iturbi anyone?) And Grace Moore didn't escape the fashion. To her everlasting discredit, she performed Cab Calloway's great viper tune, "Minnie The Moocher" in the movie "When You're In Love". (The only other significant fact about...

If you've ever wondered if it was possible to not only desexualize Marilyn Monroe but make it appear that she really had quite desperately small breasts that she needed to make look larger by wearing the weird brassiere you're about to see ,the answer is: YES! Just watch the diabolical handiwork of Darryl Zanuck, Walter Lang, Jack Cole and Irving Berlin in "There's No Business Like Show Business", a 1954 20th Century Fox abortion which takes a bunch of Berlin songs (again poor Oiving!) and positions them, shakily, in such an overheated melange of tasteless technicolor production numbers draped in garish, awful costumes that one wonders how Monroe, Berlin and even the faceless, probably blameless director, Walter Lang, survived. Watching "TNBLSB" is somewhat akin to being force fed an old bag of marshmellows--uncooked, unwanted and indigestible. And so we come to the infamous "Tropical Heat Wave" number. Urban legend has it that Monroe pokes o...

If you love musicals as I do, then you have a certain special place in your heart for the one's that simply don't come off. Nothing on earth is sillier than a big fat failed musical production number--some of them fail due to dopey conceptual ideas (the "Carmen Miranda bin"), some because the actors who are singing and dancing can't do either (Peter O'Toole in "Goodbye Mr. Chips", Brando in "Guys And Dolls") and some due to inept execution on everyone's part. (By the way, if anyone out there has a favorite lousy production number, please say so and I'll try to post it.) It is to that last mentioned category that the below number belongs. So, here we go... And now, it gives me no great pleasure whatsoever to present my candiadate for MOST DISASTROUS PRODUCTION NUMBER EVER FILMED. The winner: "Putting On The Ritz". As performed by the utterly forgotten Harry Richman, in the movie "Putting On The Ritz" . Songs B...