365 Films in 365 Days

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.

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.