Lena Horne




Till the Clouds Roll By

April 16, 2007
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Till the Clouds Roll By
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Till the Clouds Roll By (1946)

Suppose you were so boring that when Hollywood decided to make the movie of your life they had to add extra characters that never really existed just so you could be more interesting…?

Set to the music of Jerome Kern, Till the Clouds Roll By does exactly that. It opens with a very long rendition of Showboat, then jumps back to Kern’s days struggling to sell a tune in London. Almost immediately he does. After a brief and idyllic courtship starting with an unlikely breaking and entry to borrow the use of a piano, Kern marries his English rose and quickly ascends to Broadway. Then…, well…, we have another 60 minutes or so left in the film for a follies-esque presentation of his greatest hits strung together by a subplot of a young actress and family friend (played by Lucille Bremmer, a singing and dancing Bette Davis type) who learns the hard way she must make her own stardom to be successful…. Never mind this woman never existed, nor her father who is supposedly Kern’s manager and mentor.
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Meet Me in Las Vegas

February 1, 2007
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Meet Me in Las Vegas
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Meet Me in Las Vegas (1956)

Cyd Charisse headlines as an uptight ballerina in a Vegas show (??). Dan Dailey is an unlucky rancher who loves to gamble. A chance meeting in a casino leads them to discover they have an unbeatable winning streak as long as they hold hands. Having nothing else in common, can love grow when their luck eventually runs out?

The plot seems as unlikely as the pairing, until you learn that Cyd’s real-life husband was crooner Tony Martin, and perhaps the film was conceived as a vehicle for them both. Tony makes a brief cameo, along with a dozen other Vegas and Hollywood stars, but otherwise Meet Me in Las Vegas is a salami-thin slice from the waning days of MGM’s musicals. Rather than further the plot, most numbers appear as onstage acts, including a ravishing Lena Horne, and Cara Williams as a hot redheaded ringer sent by the casino manager to break up their winning streak.

Cyd is in beautiful form, but choreographer Hermes Pan prefers camp and costumes to actual stretching of talent. There is one ballet number that is a ridiculous Swan Lake meets volleyball in a neoclassical pavillion. The humor is pushed when jealous Cyd gets drunk and decides to out-perform a showgirl number. The wackiest number has four devil women gyrating behind a lounge singer who belts out “Hell hath no fury like a womaaaan scoooorned”. The finale puts Cyd back at the top of all MGM’s dancers in the classic Frankie and Johnny sung by Sammy Davis Jr.



The Wiz

December 5, 2006
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The Wiz
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The Wiz (1978)

Quincy Jones updates the Wizard of Oz with an uplifting disco-soul soundtrack, but director Sidney Lumet bungles the innercity finding-yourself musical set against racial themes and New York City landmarks. Diana Ross, Micheal Jackson, Richard Pryor, Lena Horn…, the film showcases a legendary cast and one of the greatest musical talents of our age (Jones appears briefly in a nod to Cab Calloway as a piano player in the Emerald City), but Lumet robs the film of all empathy or excitement by shooting scenes wide and long from across the parking lot. It’s almost as if he is afraid to get too close to his Black performers. What would otherwise be a sparkling Motown musical as great as MGM’s original Wizard becomes a tinsel race-card curiosity.