#28 That’s Dancing!

January 27, 2021
That’s Dancing! (1985) ****
TCM
Free
Wildcard

In the That’s Entertainment universe, That’s Dancing comes in between II and III, and takes a very different approach than its predecessors.

That’s Entertainment the first contains numbers from MGM musicals released between 1929 and 1958, The Hollywood Revue of 1929 to Gigi, aka the Golden Age of Musicals. That’s Entertainment II covers a slightly longer period, through 1962 with the clip from Jumbo, still MGM only, but adding clips from non-musical films as well.

That’s Dancing both expands and contracts from II, in that it is obviously all dancing, but it includes films going all the way up to 1983, many different styles of dance, and from studios beyond MGM, so we finally get to see Fred and Ginger in more than just The Barclays of Broadway.

We go back to multiple hosts, including Mikhail Baryshnikov, Ray Bolger, Liza Minelli, Sammy Davis Jr., and, of course, Gene Kelly, the only host to appear in all four movies. It even starts out with street dancers breakdancing! And with not the slightest bit of condescension of any kind being shown towards the modern dances by any of the great dancers hosting. Game recognizes game.

They had some really marvelously seldom seen scenes in this film, like Ray Bolger’s Scarecrow dance that had been cut from the Wizard of Oz. Have I mentioned yet that Ray Bolger gave me my very first tap lesson, impromptu on the Warner lot? I don’t think I could’ve been more than eight years old, and I’m fairly certain I’ve told every single person I met in the subsequent 48 years.

My favorite dancer in the movie, though, was Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. Of course, I’ve seen him dance with Shirley Temple in The Littlest Rebel before, everyone has seen that dance, the staircase dance, and understood its importance in the history of film as the first interracial dance couple on the screen, and, I imagine, the first black and white person to hold hands on the screen as well. But then they showed him in another film, dancing a specialty number in what was clearly a minstrel show scene, as there were actors in blackface behind him, watching him dance, but he is dressed in a beautiful suit, incredibly handsome, not made up to look old, and dancing like an absolute angel. I have never seen him look like that or dance like that before, and I think I need to start hunting down his films.

There is also ballet (obviously, with Baryshnikov hosting), and clips from Flashdance and Saturday Night Fever to bring us into, what was then, the present. This is a real treasure of a film.