Dancing Lady (1933)

Dancing Lady
Directed by Robert Z. Leonard
Written by Allen Rivkin and P.J. Wolfson from a book by James Warner Bellah
1933/US
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
IMDb page
Repeat viewing/Amazon Prime rental

Janie ‘Duchess’ Barlow: I’m like the guy throwing quarters in the slot machine. I keep on trying.

Joan Crawford plays the title character and gets to show off her dance moves in this all-star MGM musical extravaganza.

Janie Barlow (Crawford) lives to dance but is currently stuck in a burlesque show. Tod Newton (Franchot Tone) and some of his high class friends attend the show as a bit of slumming. Tod immediately has the hots for Janie and bails her out when she is arrested in a raid of the burlesque house. Since she can’t be bought for money or fancy presents, he tries to get next to her by helping to fulfill her dreams of dancing on Broadway.

He finally softens her up slightly through his friend, a producer of a show directed by Patch Gallagher (Clark Gable). Patch is not about to have an untalented newcomer foisted upon him so sets up a “brush off” audition with the stage manager and his underlings (Ted Healy and the Three Stooges). But it turns out Janie is a fantastic dancer. We watch as she makes good, all the time dodging Franchot’s advances.

The stars shine but, unfortunately, I didn’t think the musical numbers were up to much. This clearly was made before the heyday of the MGM musical. With Fred Astaire (in his screen debut) playing himself; Nelson Eddy singing in one of his first roles; Robert Benchley; and the Three Stooges as stagehands. These folks deserved something more than Bavarian beer garden numbers.

What a Busby Berkeley style number looks like when you don’t have Busby Berkeley at the helm.

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I also recently rewatched “The Little Giant” (1933) which I previously reviewed here.