As much as I love the musical numbers here, I can't help but be distracted by the fact the characters never age, despite the passage of roughly 25 years. Nitpicking, I spoze, since the same thing occurs in ALEXANDER'S RAGTIME BAND. And even though he looks pretty good, I also can't get over the fact that Bill Robinson was roughly 40 years older than Ms. Horne! That's more than the age gap between Fred Astaire and Audrey Hepburn for FUNNY FACE.
shareIt was a black film and the studio wasn't going all out on expenses. So forget expensive make-up artists. Even the costumes were recylced from old white movies. I'm just thankful that the film was made.
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Hi,one can never be too rich or have too many friends. Not sure about the costume thing, Designer Helen Rose says in her book "just Make Them Beautiful" she designed Lena Horne's costumes as well as the chorus dancers. Production was held up when the white hairdresser refused to touch Lena and demanded they send out for black hairdresser. Miss Rose was so infuriated,she did Lena's hair herself and got into trouble with the unions for being out of her jurisdiction. This movie was also the first time the commisary at Fox was intergrated. At first blacks had to eat outside at snack wagons but the head of the studio decided they were working actors like everyone else and let them in. The head of the commisary wanted a seperate area but the boss said let them sit where they want. Soon,every studio dropped the restricted rule.
Improbable, maybe...but as someone who has seen a half-century go by, I find it inspiring. Go, Bill! :^D
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All those years of "hoofing" (slang for tap dancing), kept Mr. Bill Robinson
in great shape. He might have been that much older than Ms. Lena Horne, but he
looked great, and personifies a phrase my grandmother use to say:
"GOOD BLACK IS HARD TO CRACK"!
"OOO...I'M GON' TELL MAMA!"
Hi,one can never be too rich or have too many friends. He was really a great dancer and it was nice seeing him dance up a storm without being someone's butler. Did u know Fred Astaire considered him one of the world's great dancers?
Hi,one can never be too rich or have too many friends. I was surprised when Lena Horne's daughter said her mother said Bill Robinson was an "Uncle tom," of all things..He went throught all that racial stuff worse than Lena. U had two options,keep smiling or be a rebel and not work at all. Look at Paul Robeson,surely one of the great talents but he was a rebel. Ethel Waters made waves too and was banned from movies for a long time. In a book about Dorothy Dandridge,she didn't like working with Brock Peters because he was 'so black" Lena and Dorothy were the supposedly new images of black actors,light skinned with no servile tendencies.
I happened to watch ALEXANDER'S RAGTIME BAND last week, and as I said in 2005, time passes, but you wouldn't know it by the main characters. Going to the other extreme is MR. SATURDAY NIGHT. When the main characters are supposed to be in their early 60's, they have on so much aging makeup, they look fossilized.
share "In a book about Dorothy Dandridge,she didn't like working with Brock Peters because he was 'so black"
That is NOT true! Brock Peters himself said that Otto Preminger told him that during the making of Porgy and Bess, a film set that Otto made hell for Dorothy because he was scorned that she dumped him! Otto wanted a really violent rape scene between Brock and Dorothy and told him that Dorothy made the comment to trigger anger from Brock, Brock himself said that Dorothy and he sat together during a plane ride after the scene was shot and he saw no "Unease" from her, they became great friends, Dorothy was also a friend of Nat King Cole and they both pitched tv series pilots to studios, one pilot had them play husband and wife.
I thought Bill Robinson looked damn good for his age--about 65 or so. If there was an age difference, it would be barely noticeable
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