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Maybe I have too much time on my hands and not enough to do, but sometimes I find myself wandering down a mental byway where none have ever ventured before, held back by fear of the unknown. I got off on one of these tangents lately, inspired by a sequence I saw in a collection of scenes from old MGM musicals. “That’s Entertainment” is the title in case anyone is unfamiliar with it.
Right from the beginning I got a strange impression of something a bit unworldly going on the screen as I watched a lady named Eleanor Powell as she danced her way through a battalion of male dancers whom she scattered before her like the Assyrian coming down like a wolf on the fold. Pretty good for a woman, I thought, but then I recollected that she was a man too! She was dressed like one at least, with a well-cut set of tails and a top hat besides, although she did give things away a bit by wearing a pair of high heels.
This was all confusing. Was I seeing a dominatrix in action or just a gal who had to get into pants to do the kind of acrobatics she did? Was Hollywood trying to sell us something or was it all just innocent fun? What about all these guys on stage collapsing before her? Was there a message here?
More research was indicated. I began to take a closer look at the offerings in front of me. The next scene was from a movie about Florenz Ziegfeld, the Broadway producer, who apparently thought the right formula for a show was as many girls as you could possibly fit on a stage with one male to do the singing. Not much to be learned from that.
After that there was a feature with Lucille Ball, before she became “Loocy”, playing a kind of animal trainer whipping a lot of cats into line. The ones in the cat costumes were all females, though, so one couldn’t come up with great thoughts about reversal of sexual roles and people searching for their identities and all that, so it was time to go on to something else, with maybe a backward glance at those costumes.
Still pursuing truth, I found myself caught up watching 22 Esther Williams movies. Well, at least excerpts from them. I didn’t learn anything about the battle of the sexes from them, except that in pool movies women counted the most. They were about bathing beauties, not a male category. Incredible as it may seem, I liked them all the same. I was like the man in the New Yorker cartoon looking at a chorus line and saying “Kinda makes you proud to be an American, doesn’t it?” And yes, I overcame my fear about the screen springing a leak.
The next episodes brought me back to reality, though, to the front where the battle was really being waged. I mean, Cyd Charisse in a go-to-hell skirt and blouse simply staring down a crew of boxers complete with gloves and headgear and bending them to her will so that they sat up and begged like pet puppies. All in good fun, you say? I wonder about that. I see this kind of thing as brainwashing, part of the softening-up process designed for what…well, not for enhancing our view of male supremacy anyway. That’s a lost cause in these movies. It’s not what the songs and dances are about. I know showing the men in charge would be a bomb, old stuff, so that you have to be paradoxical and present the opposite to get attention, but it still worries me just a little.
More radical feminism is on view when Ann Miller comes on to dance -- on a floor where she’s alone except for some saxophones and trombones protruding from holes therein. Under the floor some men are playing these instruments, but they don’t have a chance. Ann dances over to them and stamps her feet and the instruments disappear below the floor and their music is silenced. Presumably the unfortunate players have been knocked unconscious by the stamped feet and Ann remains in sole possession of the floor.
What does all this symbolize? Once again, it ain’t about male glory. I could speculate on what it is about, but I’ll give that a rest for a moment and suggest that all it means in this case is that some scriptwriters couldn’t think of some sensible way to add a few props to dress up the bare dance floor and came up with the underground railroad solution instead. So I’m not going to classify this odd exhibition as anything but a dance routine that got overloaded with cute ideas that didn’t work.
So I tell myself, but the next segment of the movie turns out to be a variation on the same theme. Can all this be coincidental? Or is there a plan here? Put men in their place and keep them there. Is that it? What else can anyone think when a lady named Dolores Grey also turns her dance into a battle with the musicians’ union, whom she overcomes with strongarm tactics straight from Jimmy Hoffa? Unlike Ann Miller, from whom the instrumentalists hid under the dance floor, Dolores’s victims stand up in their foxholes and resist her attempts to silence them. It’s no use; she literally slams trapdoors over them and continues her dance without them, smiling brightly all the way.
As if that weren’t shocking enough, the next hell raiser we encounter is none other than, yes, the dominatrix herself, back for more troublemaking, still passing as a man in top hat, white tie and tails, plus high heels again, and once more tearing through massed columns of males similarly dressed. Eleanor Powell rides again, in other words, and she’s taking no prisoners. She’s even more ruthless than before although she’s making nice with a tune called “Fascinating Rhythm” played by two black pianists. In 1941.
So it went in this movie. The men didn’t have much of a show. They got on the screen all right, but unlike the women, who were surrounded by male admirers struck dumb by their beauty and talent, they usually got along without a female chorus swooning in their presence. In this movie it was girls’ night out.
There were three installments of the movie, one of which I haven’t seen yet. Between the three it looks like everyone whoever worked in an MGM picture got in, including totally non-musical types like John Barrymore. That made me wonder why none of the casts included Van Johnson or George Murphy, who did come from musicals. I said at the beginning of this piece that I probably had too little to occupy me, and this kind of thing shows it, I‘m afraid. More Trivial Pursuit in time to come. | | |