1h 13min | Comedy, Drama, Music | (no release date)
Director: Josh Binney
Stars: Dusty Fletcher, George Wiltshire, Butterfly McQueen, Moms Mabley, Nat 'King' Cole.
Charles Morrison ... choreographer / dance director
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0040508/
Available on AmazonPrime, but played my megapack copy, which is a poor print.
Available on AmazonPrime, but played my megapack copy, which is a poor print.
It's hard to believe that steel guitars became popular...until the band played a proto-rock number.
It's not obvious from this why Nat King Cole will become a crossover artist. But he's singing some mediocre songs here, with a bouncy rhythm. Mona Lisa they ain't.
Patterson & Jackson: only Patterson danced, Jackson sang. Both are heavy-set. Patterson danced pretty well, and we could hear his taps, which gave a nice rhythm. In their 2nd number, they only sang, imitating the Ink Spots with If I Didn't Care. It was ok.
The Clark Brothers were deeply mediocre. They were seldom in unison, yet never contribute enough of interest to make being different ok. They eventually did some splits, a handstand over the other. But their main thing was making noise with their feet, because they didn't really move much. The problem: the band, especially the drummer, drowned out their taps. I could blame poor sound recording on a micro-budget race film, but the prior paragraph illustrated that didn't have to happen here.
Moms Mabley was onstage twice, and presented herself in the usual wardrobe, but did different comedy than in the recent Boarding House Blues. But it was nothing to write home about.
All other acts (singers, big band numbers) were shrugworthy too.
The best was the comedy was the beginning of the film, where top-billed Dusty 'Open the Door Richard' Fletcher played a magician who had no control of his boxes that made people disappear. So the cops are called, and disappear too. When they reappear, they chase him like this is a Keystone Cops film, even reversing the footage at one point. It worked for me. If you haven't see the Open the Door Richard ('47) short (looks like it was a record too?), it might be worth seeing it first. Or just know that in a prior film, Dusty had trouble getting Richard to open a door, since that's referenced here.
But really, the whole thing is skippable.
All-American News, dir. Binney; 5
