Hi
I was just watching Star! for the third time and I love it so much. But I still don't get what Richard shows Gertrude in The Curtain Club. What is it? Does anyone know?
Julie's actually really great in this movie because knowing The Sound of Music and Mary Poppins, it's like Julie's the sweet, kind nanny. In that film she shows, how truly great she is.
Barbara*
They go to THE COTTON CLUB. He obviously shows her a strip number (listen to the music) and she realises how she should play Jenny in Lady In The dark.
shareThank you. Couldn't really understand it.
Barbara
omg!! I didnt get that part until now, it all makes sense now, cheers
shareI've never understood why they don't show any of that performance - only using background music instead... Seems kinda odd to me!!! Was it to keep the JENNY number as a big surprise?? Did they not want to show anyone except Julie performing?? Did they not want to show a black woman strip?? (Lets not forget this WAS a mainstream Hollywood film of the 1960's!)
shareUpon seeing the film on release, I thought it was staged oddly, too. I don't believe that it was a decision not to show a black woman perform as a courtesy to Ms. Andrews (they didn't strip at the Cotton Club, I believe). My 16 year old thought was that they were trying to save money on a set and extra actors by not shooting yet another big set in the film. I still think that's what happened.
shareI had the chance to ask Richard Crenna the same question (i.e. What was it he and Julie Andrews were supposedly watching in that Harlem night club?). It was while he was filming a movie in Paris in 1971, so the scene must still have been fresh in his memory, having been shot only three years before. He admitted that he hadn't the slightest idea, and that the exact nature of the supposed floor show was never revealed, even to the actors involved. Just use your imagination, I guess, if you want to figure it out!
shareWhoa!! Thanks for that. Straight from the horses mouth so to speak.... Obviously that scene made enough of an impression on you too to ask him 3 yrs later. It does seem strange though, with all the money poured into that movie, that they didn't spend a bit more on even just a quick shot of something to make the scene make a bit more sense. Aahh Hollywood....
shareAs you correctly observed, Nathan,"Obviously that scene made enough of an impression on you too to ask him 3 yrs later." On further reflection, it seems to me quite unlikely that the floor show was a real strip tease. The Cotton Club wasn't a burlesque house, after all. Perhaps it was some kind of high-flying aerial acrobatics, performed by a trapeze artist, for instance. That's more in line with what Gertie does at the end of her number. You're right, though, an establishing shot would have made the scene more coherent. I guess they didn't want the audience to guess what the visual climax of "The Saga of Jenny" would be.
Too bad the film was such a flop at the box office. But remember, it opened around the same time as "Funny Girl" and I think it suffered by comparison.
Also, it represented a radical departure for Julie Andrews from her up-until-then major "sweetness and light" roles (Mary Poppins and Maria).
Thank heaven for the DVD.
The story that has gotten told over and over again, with various differences, is that on the pre-Broadway tour of Lady in the Dark, Danny Kaye was getting a tremendous ovation for his number "Tchaikovsky," after which Gertie performed "The Saga of Jenny" to lesser response, until the night when she did the number with bumps and grinds, like a stripper would, which topped Danny Kaye's performance and brought down the house. In all the variations of this story, I have never heard that a visit to the Cotton Club is what inspired her, and indeed such a visit would have been unlikely if the change in her performance came about while the show was still out of town.
(I actually doubt the whole truth of this "transformation" story. We are dealing after all with seasoned professionals here, not children or amateurs. They knew what they were doing, and the music of "Saga of Jenny" is already rather sensuous and not the bland, square thing we at first see Julie Andrews rehearsing.)
The Cotton Club was known neither for strippers nor high-wire aerial acts (which was an embellishment for the movie, anyway). However, it is quite conceivable that you could see some sexy moves among the dancers there.
The confusion over this sequence, further confused by the huge exaggeration of the "Jenny" production number itself, is typical of the reasons why this movie flopped (despite the many, many enjoyable compensations along the way).
I have made enough faces.
I always thought that the inspiration offered at the Cotton Club was not striptease (after all, Gertrude does not do a striptease in "Jenny"), but rather simply a style for the number itself--i.e. instead of doing it in the typical BWay style of the 1930s production number, she did it in a more "jazzy," freer style. But take note of the previous poster's comment about these being all professionals, and the Cotton Club story is probably completely fictional.
Allen Roth
"I look up, I look down..."
Most questions about the scene in The Cotton Club can be answered by listening to the audio commentary on the DVD. Like some scenes in the movie it was fiction, the film makers were not going for accuracy or realism but for pure entertainment, BOY!, how well they succeeded.
shareThe music chosen by veteran producer Saul Chaplin for this scene is Duke Ellington's "Black and Tan Fantasy" - to convey a jazzy bump and grind dance number. I agree that at least a couple quick cuts to a dancer's hips might have better established what was going on in that scene, and if you notice the carefully executed closed captioning on the laserdisc, some effort was put in there to clue viewers into what the characters were seeing. Unfortunately, Fox decided to ignore the LD captions and made up new ones for the DVD that don't even include lyrics to the songs.
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