We’re continuing Obscure Movie Month here, with all movies under review having less than 1,000 IMDb votes. The actual total will be in square brackets, next to the title and star rating.
It’s also the busiest time of the year for me at work, so this week is a bit light, but hopefully what I have to offer satisfies. And we start with…
That’s Dancing! (1985) – ***½ [915]
That’s Dancing! isn’t exactly part of the That’s Entertainment! series, but it might be considered a first cousin; it was directed by Jack Haley Jr., who directed the first film; Bud Friedgen, who edited the other three films (and co-directed the third), assisted with the assembly; and it features Gene Kelly and Liza Minnelli among its co-hosts, both of whom appeared in the first film, with Kelly directing and co-hosting the second (and making his final appearance in the third). And it heavily draws upon MGM’s musical legacy throughout.
However, it does not do so exclusively. It features clips from non-MGM pictures like 42nd Street, The Gay Divorcee, Oklahoma!, West Side Story, Saturday Night Fever, and Flashdance. And it was to have even more, at least according to the film’s IMDb trivia page, which offers an extensive, if rather opinionated, rundown of what didn’t make the cut for various reasons, mostly related to rights issues and running time (That’s Entertainment! and Part II both run well over two hours, but Dancing clocks in at just 105 minutes).
Certainly the film seems a bit more scattershot than its predecessors, as it combines the nostalgia of those films with a more informational approach, as we get scenes of native dances from around the world, scenes from silent dance films, a brief explanation of breakdancing (performed by some New York youths) and a digression on the work of Edgar Degas leading into an exploration of ballet on film, narrated by Mikhail Baryshnikov (who never did a musical for MGM, but whatever). For my money, the film would’ve worked better with a more scholarly approach; the fluffy tone of the earlier films was in keeping with their nostalgic aims, but here what real information we get makes us want more of that and less gushing praise.
Still, there’s some great material on display here, from an overview of Busby Berkeley’s most stunning creations, with their geometric arrangements of dancers, sets, and costumes, to a delightful tap duet between little Shirley Temple and Bojangles Robinson, from a terrifically sensuous faux-Hawaiian number by Eleanor Powell to a stunning duet by the Nicholas Brothers. And there’s some rare footage that’s a real treat for buffs, most notably an extended dance routine for Ray Bolger’s Scarecrow that was cut from The Wizard of Oz (probably for the best), and blue-screen footage from the animated segment of Kelly’s fascinating all-dance film, Invitation to the Dance.
The newer material is relatively undistinguished; it’s filled with likable folks—in addition to Kelly, Minnelli, and Baryshnikov, we get Ray Bolger and Sammy Davis Jr., who gets to riff on a clip from his first film appearance at age 7, in a short called Rufus Jones for President—and we do get some helpful info, along with a welcome nod to the virtues of contemporary dance, as the film concludes with an extended clip from the video for “Beat It.” But as noted, the film seems a bit torn between being a nostalgia trip and a serious overview of dance in the cinema, and the newer material can feel a bit half-hearted.
There are also a couple of new songs: the title song, with music by Henry Mancini, which starts with a rather silly chant (“The heart…the beat…to start…the feet”), and “Invitation to Dance” by Kim Carnes, which is extremely forgettable. Neither do much to help the film (nor, I should add, does a rather gratuitous dig by Kelly at the weight of MGM’s early chorus girls, which echoes a similar line from Frank Sinatra in the first film), but trying to write new songs to stand alongside the classics on display was always going to be a bit of a fool’s errand.
Those issues aside, That’s Dancing! is quite enjoyable as well worth seeing for dance and musical fans. But as with the other films in this series, watching the best films excerpted here would be an even better use of your time, especially now that it’s just as easy to see those films as this one.
Score: 79
A Tiger Walks (1964) – *** [286]
It might seem a bit strange for a Disney film to be so little-seen, but the studio has made quite a few now-obscure live-action pictures over the years, some of interest to me (Moon Pilot) and some…not (Monkeys, Go Home!). I only had a copy of A Tiger Walks by pure chance; I think the DVD was only released via the Disney Movie Club, and someone who didn’t care for it gave their copy to a local thrift store, so I got it for a dollar or two. I had been curious about it, however, thanks to Leonard Maltin’s comments on it in his excellent The Disney Films, in which he discusses its highly cynical depiction of small-town America. He wasn’t wrong, though the film takes aim at far more than that.
In the small town of Scotia, a truck carrying the tigers from Kelso’s Wild Animal Show blows a tire, forcing their handler Ram Singh (Sabu) and wrangler Josef Pietz (Theodore Marcuse) to wait for a spare tire to be delivered. Pietz gets drunk and belligerent, and decides to show off for the locals, prodding male tiger Raja and opening his cage for…god knows what reason. Braggadocio. Anyhow, Pietz lets down his guard for a split second, and Raja escapes, sending the crowd fleeing. Teenager Julie Williams (Pamela Franklin) stumbles while running and shares a look with Raja, who instead flees into the woods. Pietz grabs a shotgun (which he doesn’t know has only one shell) and Singh grabs a net, and they head into the woods, but night soon falls.
Julie’s father, Sheriff Pete Williams (Brian Keith), takes command of the search, rounding up a posse and heading into the foggy darkness. While searching, they find Pietz dead, mauled to death by Raja. The posse lose their nerve, forcing Williams to call off the search until the fog lifts (which it takes its sweet time doing around Scotia). Meanwhile, everyone around him is trying to capitalize on the situation, from reporters trying to outdo each other with lurid headlines, to politicians trying to use the incident to their benefit in the upcoming elections, to locals trying to raise the profile of the town and maybe make a little money in the process. And with the death of Pietz, calls mount for Raja to be destroyed.
That is, until Julie, being interviewed on TV, declares her desire for Raja to be safely recaptured and given a better home for himself, his mate, and their cubs than the cages they currently live in, which leads to a movement among the nation’s children to raise money to, as a chant goes, “Save the tiger! *roar* Save the tiger! *growl*“ Julie also implies that her father means to take Raja alive, leading the governor (Edward Andrews) to send in the National Guard. Despite the numerous headaches the situation is causing him, Andrews hopes to bring about a happy ending to the story.
A Tiger Walks mixes the good-natured ribbing of human folly you’d expect from a Disney film (like the well-meaning but goofy “Save the Tiger” movement) and a somewhat darker look at what happens when agendas conflict with common sense and decency. It’s one thing to have the owner of the local motel (Una Merkel) milking the situation to line her pockets whilst humming “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” to herself. It’s quite another to have a soldier, eager to get his picture in the paper, do so by accidentally shooting an old man (Arthur Hunnicutt) in the arm because of the fog and the trigger-happy atmosphere. And while Julie’s forthright sympathy for Raja may seem a touch naive to the adults around her, as her mother Dorothy (Vera Miles) points out, she’s only reflecting the values her parents raised her with.
For younger viewers, A Tiger Walks might well serve as a good introduction to the concept of social satire, though older viewers will likely note that, compared to Billy Wilder’s critiques of American society (Ace in the Hole comes to mind), the satire here is fairly tame and broad. For them, the interest may lie more in the solid cast, all of whom do solid work, and the fact that this was Sabu’s final film; he died unexpectedly of a heart attack four months before it opened. That said, it’s also a decently compelling little adventure, and if other films have made its points about politicians, the media, and mass hysteria more effectively, it still does so effectively.
It’s as well made as you’d expect a Disney film of this period to be; Norman Tokar’s direction is efficient, if undistinguished, at least until the final act, which is appreciably tense. William E. Snyder’s cinematography makes decent use of the landscapes and fog, but can’t hide a few dodgy blue-screen effects (used because you don’t want a tiger running loose around children or livestock, however well trained). The script is by Lowell S. Hawley, doing a far better job than he did on Babes in Toyland, with scenes like the governor staging a hilariously phony photo-op and lines like “This close to an election time, I gotta at least look like I’m workin’.”
Score: 72
Cinerama’s Russian Adventure (1966) – *** [80]
Watching a Cinerama film on anything but a big screen loses something; watching it on your phone, even in full-screen, is more akin to playing a cruel joke on the film than doing it justice. But I’d wanted to see this, the last of the Cinerama travelogues, for literally years, and I was supposed to take an actual trip to Russia this past May, which was cancelled on account of COVID. So when the best option at present was to see it on my phone, well, I took it.
Obviously, something was lost; I would certainly give the film another chance if I could do so in anything like a suitable fashion. I wouldn’t expect too much—even in this diminished form, I can tell it’s a long way from a great film—but the daunting scale of Cinerama is such a huge part of the experience that I have to imagine my score would go up at least a few points.
Now, the first thing to remember about Russian Adventure is that it didn’t actually begin as a Cinerama film. Rather, it was assembled from several documentaries made in Kinopanorama, the Soviet equivalent of three-panel Cinerama, which were pieced together with narration by the quintessentially Russian Bing Crosby to smooth over the gaps.
The result isn’t seamless, however, and feels distinctly like several films with different subjects and styles (the credits list six different directors) stitched together. Given the sheer variety of the USSR’s landscape and culture, that might not seem like a problem, but the material we have heavily favors the western part of the Union, and the Russian Soviet Republic even more so. A good third of the film is devoted to the performing arts in Moscow, while Siberia and Central Asia get all too little attention.
There are some truly impressive sequences, to be sure. My own favorite is the forest sequence in Part II, with a long tracking shot through the trees that evokes Bambi as much as anything, and makes great use of the sounds of the forest (which must’ve sounded great in the Cinerama theater). There’s also a rather exciting boar hunt in the desert (not to kill the creature but remove him from another’s territory), with the camera sweeping across the dusty ground, a nifty trip down the Tisa river on a Hutsul lumber-raft, and a whimsical sequence about Mishka, the brown bear, and the mischief he gets up to—including giving an old beekeeper a nightmare in which Mishka loads up a cart with his beehives and drives them away with a stolen tractor (!):
Other sequences, however, decidedly outstay their welcome. The second act begins with performances by the Moiseyev and Platnitsky dance ensembles (part of which is set to music that sounds oddly like Enescu’s “Romanian Rhapsody No. 1”); these go on for 8½ minutes. The finale is a series of performances by the Bolshoi Ballet which go on for 12 minutes. And the last section of Part I profiles the Moscow Circus for an agonizing 18 minutes. These sequences all have striking moments (I especially liked the glimpses of the Othello ballet), but they get really tedious after a while.
Other elements of the film seem dated at best and actively problematic at worst. There’s a sequence depicting the Soviet whaling industry, and while the film makes clear that this is being done for industrial purposes, to modern viewers the killing and subsequent butchery of the whale may be hard to take. And the film’s totally apolitical nature simply seems naive; I wouldn’t expect, say, a tour of the gulags or a re-enactment of the Secret Speech, but for a film released at the height of the Cold War to not even touch upon the highly political nature of Soviet society is…a choice, let’s just say that.
Crosby’s narration is likable enough, but hit-and-miss in terms of offering useful information and rather erratic in tone; sometimes he’ll deliver florid passages like
“…and so its pressure ridges, cornices, and blocks endure as monuments on a vast white battlefield where opposing ice sheets meet in colossal conflict…”
while at other times he delivers offhand comments which sound as if Bing was just riffing on the footage and they stuck his comments in. He was an odd choice, but he does all right; if nothing else, it’s amusing to hear him contend with Russian nouns like “Magnitogorsk.”
In addition to the impressive imagery, there’s a good score, primarily credited to Aleksandr Lokshin, though the classical music we hear, especially during the ballet sequences, is the best of all. But except for Cinerama buffs, you can give this one a pass; there are much better ways, including Sergei Bondarchuk’s contemporaneous War and Peace, to get a feel for the Russian landscape and national character. And for me, the main attraction was this moment:
Score: 65
Papa’s Delicate Condition (1963) – **½ [619]
In early 20th century Grangeville, Texas, Jack Griffith (Jackie Gleason) has it good. He’s got a devoted wife, Amberlyn (Glynis Johns), two daughters, popular teenager Augusta (Laurel Goodwin) and adoring young Corrie (Linda Bruhl), and a good job, as a railroad superintendent. But he’s also got a “condition”: he likes a drink, and when he drinks he tends to get into mischief. Not the normal kind, mind you; Jack is in the habit of cooking up odd schemes and leaping without looking.
When Amberlyn complains about the color of a neighbor’s house, Jack tricks him with a bogus raffle into getting it repainted. When the owner of the local drugstore refuses to give his clerk time off for the birth of his child, Jack fills in for the clerk, then talks the owner into selling the store when he threatens to fire the clerk, later forming a syndicate with his cronies to back the enterprise (giving each of them a key to the store’s “medicine cabinet”). And when the circus comes to town and Corrie becomes enamored of a pony, Jack buys the pony…with the debt-ridden circus attached.
Amberlyn, her patience at an end, packs up and leaves with their daughters to stay with her father (Charlie Ruggles), the stuffy mayor of Texarkana (Texas) who’s never liked Jack. Will Jack come to his senses and get control of his “condition” before it’s too late? (Do you really think he won’t?)
Despite what the film and the characters try to make us believe, Jack’s drinking seems more a symptom of his problems than their cause; as far as I can tell, he’s just a generally impulsive and thoughtless individual, prone to acting on whims whatever his BAC. The film was titled after its source material, a childhood reminiscence by silent-film star Corinne Griffith (i.e. Corrie), but its Oscar-winning theme song, “Call Me Irresponsible,” might have supplied a more fitting title.
The use of the song in the film is rather singular, to my knowledge, among Oscar-winning songs; after Amberlyn and the girls have left, Jack sinks into depression and gets really drunk, and slurringly sings the song to one of Amberlyn’s dresses, mounted on a mannequin. He also has a rather nasty coughing fit or two during this sequence, probably linked to his habit of puffing a cigar in every other shot. If this were a drama, it would be pretty harrowing. But then, Gleason was coming off a series of dramas like The Hustler and Requiem for a Heavyweight; his sense of comedy and tragedy might’ve been little mixed-up.
Or maybe the problem is the film, especially the script. Jack is a rather inconsistently drawn character; is he meant to be a lovable bumbler, a snarky free spirit, or maybe a good man with a serious problem? Most of the time he seems more shrewd and self-indulgent (or indulgent of Corrie’s whims), but every now and then he does something so absurdly foolish that you wonder how he hasn’t lost his job and bankrupted his family years ago; buying a whole circus so Corrie can have a pony (because kids that young—she’s about 7—aren’t incredibly capricious), then finding out it’s wracked with debts and unpaid salaries, really takes the cake.
Moreover, the film tries to play things for humor which, for me at least, aren’t too funny. I have my own reasons for not finding alcoholism, especially cutesy movie alcoholism, very funny, but we’re introduced to Jack as he’s sharing a bottle with the engineer and fireman of a train…while they’re driving it! That’s how fatal accidents happen! And later, after we’ve realized that Jack is now responsible for the livelihood of everyone in the circus, the film just drops that thread entirely. Did they all just starve because Jack’s arc didn’t need them anymore?
Add in the occasionally troubling politics of the Griffith household—Jack and Amberlyn’s relationship doesn’t always seem to be too healthy, for one—and you’ve got a film which rings sour for me just a bit too often. A lot of it is perfectly solid, especially Gleason’s one-liners (his delivery is oddly reminiscent of Mae West a lot of them) and the period detail, which is nice and colorful and nostalgic. And the song, while probably not Oscar-worthy (the nominees weren’t great, but I’d probably go with the title song from It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World), is fine. Most will cut this one a little more slack. But I couldn’t quite get there.
Score: 63
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