#30 That’s Entertainment! III

January 29, 2021
That’s Entertainment! III (1994) ****
TCM
Free
Wildcard

This was the last of the That’s Entertainment/Dancing movies, and the hook they used for this one was cut numbers, inspired by the Wizard of Oz cut number in That’s Dancing, and way more really obscure numbers.

The hosts were Gene Kelly (of course), and way more women than the earlier films, I assume because women live longer and the men were dying off, so they had to? But that may be churlish. Anyway, they had June Allyson, Cyd Charisse (instead of just showing clips of her and sighing, “Cyd Charisse, how she dances…”), Lena Horne, Ann Miller, Debbie Reynolds, and Esther Williams, along with Mickey Rooney (back from the first one), and Howard Keel.

In the TCM intro, (not part of the movie, obvs), Dana Delaney weirdly says that this movie, as opposed to II, wasn’t hosted by Fred Astaire along with Kelly, but had these other hosts instead. Yeah, this might have had something to do with the fact that Astaire had died seven years previously, so…he was busy? He wasn’t looking his best? It was just a peculiar way to word it.

When I saw Lena Horne, I was like, I wonder what she is going to say, because she never held back in her later years about all of the racism she encountered in Hollywood, and she doesn’t go as full out as she later would, but neither does she whitewash it, so to speak. She wasn’t mad about Ava Gardner specifically getting the role that she tested for in Showboat, as she emphasizes that Ava was one of her only close friends in Hollywood, but she still wasn’t happy about it forty-three years later.

What is interesting (and I don’t know if I learned it here or in one of the other movies, as they are running together a bit in my memory) and it never occurred to me before, is that Lena Horne was never going to play Julie in Showboat, as interracial couples were banned by the Hayes code, so Lena could never have been paired with Robert Sterling. Similar to how Anna May Wong wasn’t cast in The Good Earth in the one great starring role for a Chinese woman in her era, because Paul Muni was cast first, so Luise Rainer and he both wore yellowface.

There was more blackface in this film, but it made sense, because they were comparing two versions of the same number, Two-Faced Woman, sung by the same singer, India Adams, but performed by Cyd Charisse in a cut number from The Band Wagon, and Joan Crawford, in what host Debbie Reynolds charitably describes as “tropical makeup”, from Torch Song. Debbie says archly that the wrong number might have been cut. Let me tell you, that tropical makeup looked literally, not figuratively, like fully an inch of chocolate frosting. It is, without question, the most ridiculous blackface ever committed to film, Al Jolson looked one hundred times better, and that’s saying something.

They also include the numbers that Judy Garland recorded for Annie Get Your Gun before she was replaced by Betty Hutton, and she clearly wasn’t great, but neither was she helped by the worst wig and costume ever committed to celluloid, and songs in a really terrible key for her. It’s like they wanted her to fail.

These four films were a great trip down memory lane, both memory lane of the great musicals of the past, and also my own childhood where I saw the first two films and a lot of these musicals for the first time. What a treat to watch them again, or in this case, for the first time.