I love Dance Hall pretty much unreservedly. It is as pure and perfectly made a B-comedy of the period as one could imagine. Made just at the start of 20th Century Fox’s jazz-comedy heyday, it displays all the elements that made them so interesting and fun. All the more puzzling why it’s nearly impossible to see. DVDs copied from old VHS tapes can be found by providers at the dark end of the street, and it can be streamed from a couple of obscure internet sites, here and here. The prints are terrible. The film has obviously been relegated to the dust bin of Hollywood history. But it’s wonderful.
Fox specialized in comedies that were inflected with swing from top to bottom. Their stories sometimes featured important bands and their leaders — Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller among them — not just as confections but central characters. Their music director, Emil Newman, was a brilliant composer and arranger, and Raymond Scott wrote and performed in several of the films. Dance Hall doesn’t feature a band, but it has the soul that made these comedies distinctive. You can feel it from the opening credits’ score to the dance accompaniments to the underscore, with two and a half excellent song performances by Carole Landis. It starts out jumping.
The film was directed by Irving Pichel, whose other work I’m not crazy about. Here, though, he is a master of this smooth, sassy, Damon Runyonesque kind of romantic farce — and most of all its musicality, which shows up not just in the actual music but the synchronization of talk and action. The magic that makes it work is in its “stars,” Carole Landis and Cesar Romero. I put stars in quotes because neither of them really ascended to the A List. Romero was a beloved member of the Fox stable. He was the Cisco Kid in their series, and he appeared in most of the comedies in very prominent supporting roles. He wasn’t the most skilled comic actor physically, but his great good humor and slapstick timing apparently made him indispensable. Dance Hall is one of his only starring roles in a full-on comedy. (I know of two others, A Gentleman at Heart, also with Carole Landis, and Tall, Dark and Handsome.) Landis never became a big star, either, but watching Dance Hall you’d never know it. (Landis is sadly better known for her suicide in 1948.)
The story is typical of the Fox comedies. Set in an out-of-the-way fun club, “The Paradise Palace, the Hottest Spot in Pennsylvania,” it brings together the dance hall’s smooth, conceited Don Juan of a manager, Duke McKay (Romero), with a “blues singer” he has hired from New York, Lily “Venus” Brown (Landis). Their cute meet (which isn’t very cute) is of the smooth-but-clueless-lothario-meets-wise-dame school, and hinges on a tried and true trope: he doesn’t know that the girl he’s trying to impress is the star he’s trying to impress her with.
It looks like Duke is a bit of a schlimazel, since he keeps getting put in his place unexpectedly. In a scene that’s a nice parody of the battle of the apartments in Top Hat, a crap game in Duke’s apartment is keeping Lily up in her apartment across the hall. She takes matters into her own hands (with a little more street savvy than Ginger did).
Duke takes the challenge, and a classic game of screwball gender one-upmanship ensues. Duke decides that he needs to wrong-foot Lily, and takes the opportunity to reciprocate the power-play in his opponent’s apartment by bringing her her room-service breakfast.
I can’t account for my affection for this scene. Romero is often pretty broad in his supporting roles as a ladies’ man, but here he’s smooth as silk. Duke is a hero straight out of Damon Runyon — not too distant from Nathan Detroit. His street smarts have a pedigree, but his other smarts aren’t that strong. The forced clinch that’s blocked by his revulsion of chewing gum is priceless. The patter, timing, movement, and punchline (“A homegirl!”) are terrific.
Duke fully gets who he’s been smitten by only when she performs her first song. It begins with Lily rehearsing with Joe Brooks (William Henry), a gifted Gershwinish composer and pianist who heads the club’s band. Joe has aspirations to move up to Broadway, unbeknownst to Duke, who considers him a protegee, his own Dance Hall Paderewski. But Lily understands and does what she can to encourage him. The rehearsal fades nicely into the performance of an excellent McHugh-Adamson song, “There’s Something in the Air.” (The song was first done by Tony Martin in Banjo on My Knee in 1936 — a Stanwyck-McCrea comedy — and was a big hit for Artie Shaw in the US and Al Bowlly in the UK that year. I like it a lot.)
Duke still needs to assert that dominance that comes with his past sexual successes, his nice suit and (leased) convertible, his serene masculine confidence, and his thin Latin mustache. He persuades Lily to take a romantic drive with him to a moonlit lake — and then acts as if he has made her swallow the line he gives to all the girls. Furious, Lily walks away toward home, until she is picked up by an unassuming salesman (of lingerie), Max (J. Edward Bromberg), and driven home. Lily is genuinely appreciative, and Max, who is a genuinely nice guy, believes that she is as sweet on him as he is on her.
There’s a slightly anxious subplot — Joe is in love with a less than solid waitress, who is attracted to money and thinks Joe has some (he doesn’t). It turns out hilariously, but we don’t know that yet. It looks like Joe is in for a bad time. Duke flirts with said waitress in his frustration at Lily’s friendship with Max. The chewing gum re-enters. (This is probably really why Duke doesn’t want his artists chewing gum.)
Solidly screwball complication ensue. Duke has Max abducted and locked in a closet, so that he can move in on Lily in his absence. He offers her a ride home since Max has not shown up for his promised rendezvous, and Lily softens to Duke’s charm. Another lovely romantic night scene at the moonlit lake — and Lily gets her payback.
Well, it all works out in the end. Landis also has another song and a half, and they’re very fine. The first is a Revell-Gordon tune, “There’s a Lull in My Life,” which had been recorded in 1937 by several artists, including Alice Faye and Duke Ellington (with Ivie Anderson, my favorite of Duke’s singers). Excellent stuff.
The other is just a snippet of the Rainger-Robin tune “Hello Ma, I done it Again” used as a cheerful part of Lily’s character development. (Landis never recorded the song, but Ella Fitzgerald had a big hit with it with the band she inherited after Chick Webb’s death.) It’s also clear that Bill Henry can “massage the keys” like a pro — I believe he’s playing all the piano parts himself.
Bonus tracks: here’s Ella Fitzgerald’s version.
And here’s the Duke Ellington/Ivie Anderson version of “There’s a Lull in My Life.”
