Born to Dance (1936) is definitely not an undiscovered masterpiece, but it’s a fascinating piece of period cinema. Its director, Roy Del Ruth, was a fine, crafty comedy director, but this film’s direction is craaaazy — and not from genius. Still, amazingly illuminating. Why? Bear with me a while. Years ago, I had an epiphany watching the Japanese anime TV series, Neon Genesis Evangelion. I realized that in manga and anime, characters from very different graphic worlds inhabit the same story framework, and hence individual frames. They are drawn so differently that they have to have originated from different worlds. This was a very common motif in manga. The Disney-Miyazaki axis eventually excluded it from anime, but it was there in the early years. And often when characters had major emotional shifts, they would be drawn in a different graphic style. My epiphany was this: different styles of depiction co-exist in most “frames” of art, and they aren’t inconsistencies or contradictions, they are expressions of the intersections of different worlds. (Call them ontologies.) For movies, this means that every actor’s different style of acting in a given scene, or every discontinuous juxtaposition of film styles in a series of episodes, is an affirmation of the plurality of worlds. When actors have “chemistry” working together they transfer whatever their dopamine highs were into images of a community of different kinds of beings. Where was I? oh yeah, Born to Dance. Well, in some respects this is a solid B-film of the time, though it was quite popular. Eleanor Powell is the headliner — as a solo tap dancer, she was considered Fred Astaire’s female counterpart, but I have no love for her style. It’s like watching Aryan Maria from Metropolis doing a readout of an expert system’s algorithm of a Black woman’s dance in the mid-1930s. Lots of ludicrous quasi-African-American gestures with no soul or understanding, on top of pretty amazing lower body tap technique. But she was a big dancing movie star. The movie is famous for Jimmy Stewart doing his first singing role — he’s not bad, but def not good. The crazy thing is that the film — which has inspired and very funny moments — is dominated by three blonde female actresses who are short-shrifted from beginning to end, and yet steal the show anyway: Una Merkel, Virginia Bruce, and Frances Langford. Una Merkel is the best dancer but she gets only a few minutes of ensemble play to show it; Frances Langford is the smoothest mover; and Virginia Bruce has the deepest emotions. The complete weirdness of the film is exemplified by the fact that it’s Bruce — who is supposed to be an irrational diva movie star bad for our hero (Stewart) — that gets to sing the best song in the movie, “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” (the songs are by Cole Porter, did I forget to say that?), and she does it with such powerful delivery that she ends up being emotionally the deepest character in the film. That should not have happened, because then she is thrown in the dumpster. Many of the abrupt shifts and styles are tacky, but some are very interesting. I enjoyed Born to Dance, but it’s a weird one. Somewhere between one of those Hollywood revues and a backstage drama, it’s a patchwork, yet far more interesting than most. It also has a very relevant verse line, even for today: “See how Indiana now meets demands/Hogbreeders now are leaders of bands.” Nuff said.
