Movie Review of “Dancing
Lady” (from Eskimo 19 print edition)
THE A CTING SYLE in
“Dancing Lady” is sketchy, in keeping with
its characterizations. The characters can be fully
described with just a word or two. Janie is determined
but limber. Tod is smooth but soft. Tod's grandmother
is crusty but down-to-earth. Patch is high-strung but
down-to-earth. Janie's roommate is affable but
down-to-earth. Columnist Ward King (Robert
Benchley) is absent-minded and laconic. The producer's
son is empty-headed but randy. Sterling Holloway as the
play's author is a send-up of the sensitive and
self-important artist. Each character functions almost
as the personification of a quality or two, which gives
the movie at times the feeling of an allegory.
The cast has a few other treats
and distinctions. How many movies feature both Fred
Astaire and The Three Stooges? This is the only one.
Astaire has a couple of non-speaking dance scenes in
this, his film debut. This was also an early appearance
of the Stooges, when they were still billed with their
straight man as Ted Healy and His Three Stooges,
playing second fiddles to him,
with Healy appearing in several scenes by himself as
Patch's assistant.
BESIDES BEING a romantic comedy of
the breaking-into-show-business species, “Dancing
Lady” is also a musical, and here again it is
useful to remember the date, for we are still in the
period before “Oklahoma” (1943, filmed in
1955) changed the shape of this form by having musical
numbers define character and advance plot.
“Dancing Lady” still belongs to the days
when musicals were ramshackle affairs with musical
numbers perched atop the story like ornaments, and just
as suitable for one musical as any other. One of the
big production numbers in this movie about
uptown/downtown show biz is a costume fantasy called
“Let's Go Bavarian.”
Much of the dancing –
especially in the rehearsals – is tap-influenced
and has a bobbing up-and-down movement that is
antithetical to the flowing movements of ballroom- and
jazz-influenced choreography that dominates modern
musicals. Some of the singing, too, – the
crooning Rudy Vallee imitator – hearkens back to
an antique form that may strike viewers today as silly.
The finale of big production
numbers, interrupted by a few audience reaction shots,
feels almost like a tacked-on epilogue. Taken together
with the style of the sets and choreography –
stately, abstract, distant and dreamy – and the
still-impressive special effects by Slavko Vorkapich,
the musical sequence will tempt many viewers today to
dismiss it as grandiose and ridiculous. The movie gives
no credit for choreography but this looks like the work
of Busby Berkeley, who specialized in assembling
dancers into large abstract patterns, like petals of a
flower kaleidoscoping from one fanciful shape to
another, or the teeth of some huge psychedelic gear
slowly revolving. These numbers are lavish but
emotionally cool, like a spectacle observed from afar.
In fact, the whole set is rather like a vast, soft
machine with its jeweled gears meshing together to form
an opiated vision of the factory, slowed down and
etherial but still potent. Remember that the modern
factory in 1933 was still something of a novelty,
inspiring wonder and terror (which Chaplin worked with
explicitly three years later in “Modern
Times”). This whole tail end of the movie is best
seen as an extended dream sequence that bears a
compensatory rather than a logical relationship to the
main story. In this stage world, there is no conflict,
no struggle, no poverty, no passion, just a smooth
progression of images of luxury and ease. It completes
the bracketing of the movie with theatrical scenes:
cheap burlesque at the beginning, expensive musical at
the end. We've moved uptown with Janie but we're still
in a room with people staring at beautiful, scantily
clothed women – one of the elemental attractions
of the cinema that hasn't changed.
