Wed 27 May 2015
DANCE HALL. 20th Century Fox, 1941. Carole Landis, Cesar Romero, William Henry, June Storey, J. Edward Bromberg, Charles Halton. Based on the novel The Giant Swing by W. R. Burnett (1932). Director: Irving Pichel.
According to what I’ve been able to uncover so far, and you certainly may correct me if I’m wrong, The Giant Swing was a hard-boiled novel about a jazz musician try to make his way to the top. The page for the film on the AFI website says that “the studio purchased W. R. Burnett’s novel in 1932 and began preparing scripts for it from that time. Among the writers who over the years worked on the adaptation were: W. R. Burnett, Garrett Fort, Howard J. Green, Doris Anderson, Lester Cole, Winifred Willis, Kathryn Scola, Lamar Trotti, William A. Drake, Robert Yost, Sally Sandlin, Shepard Traube and Horace McCoy.”
If my description of the book is correct, there were a lot of changes made in all that time and with all those hands working on it, I have a feeling that the end result may be a long way from its beginnings.
There is a piano player in the movie, and he is trying to write his own music while his career is stuck while spending his nights in a 1940s dance hall. But his problems play only third or fourth fiddle (bad metaphor) to the love-hate romance between the womanizing manager of the club (Cesar Romero) and the beautiful new singer (Carole Landis), whom I believe does her own singing, and quite well, too.
In spite of all their spats, Lily Brown sees something in the smooth-talking Duke McKay that I don’t see, but I imagine the ladies in the audience in 1941 may have felt the same way as she did, too. And at length, at just over 70 minutes of playing time, with each playing amusing tricks on the other, romance finds its way — and the piano player is on his way to New York with the song he has composed.
I found this moderately entertaining, but not particularly funny. The concept of on-and-off romances like this is OK, but I found the aforementioned tricks they play on each other a little too mean-spirited for me, for lack of a better term. (She steals his car behind his back while he thinks he’s proposing to her, and through a ruse he locks up another would-be suitor in a closet while she waits for the fellow outside the club alone.)
Carole Landis was only 22 when she made this film, and whatever charm the movie had for me, which was more than a little, most of it was because of her presence in it.
May 28th, 2015 at 7:08 pm
This kind of fluff piece really needed the star power of a Tyrone Power and Alice Faye or energy of a John Payne and Betty Grable mix. Much as I admire Landis and Romero they are secondary leads and don’t really carry a film like this.
Shame no one filmed Burnett’s novel.
May 28th, 2015 at 9:24 pm
Your choice of alternate pairs of leading stars is right on, David. From the AFI page, and I quote:
According to a HR news item and studio publicity, after the picture was completed, studio executives viewed a rough cut and decided to upgrade the film from “its original intended program rating to full ‘A’ status.” The film was then “given a class A advertising budget, an increased music appropriation and all the trimmings that the most important productions receive.”
This is why the movie runs 70 minutes instead of the 60 minutes an ordinary programmer would. What the studio folks didn’t do, was to increase the star power, a change which was obviously way too late.
May 28th, 2015 at 9:29 pm
Gee and goshes, as in Dondi, I think Landis and Romero just fine.
May 28th, 2015 at 9:42 pm
Landis and Romero were also paired together in A GENTLEMAN AT HEART (1942) which I will be watching soon. I’ll be sure to let everyone know what I think of them then, when I do. They also both appeared in ORCHESTRA WIVES (1942) and WINTERTIME (1943), but neither was the star of either.