'Hooray for Love' is the great title of this goodish B-musical (and of one poor song near the closing). The best assets of this so-so show are its three African-American performers: the great Fats Waller, the great Bill Robinson, and the very talented (and pretty) dancer Jeni Le Gon. In recent years, Ms Le Gon's career has received much attention in retrospective: oddly, she received far too little attention (and far too few film appearances) during her prime years as a dancer. This can't be entirely down to racism, as other black performers were working steadily during that period.
I've never understood why Bill Robinson was nicknamed Bojangles. Some other tap dancers (such as Buck and Bubbles) wore double-plate tap shoes which created a jangling syncopated sound. But Robinson always performed in single-plate tap shoes which gave a clear crisp tone to his expert footwork. He's in fine form here, doing some of the best dancing of his career without the need to simplify his steps so that some lesser partner (such as Shirley Temple) can keep up with him. Jeni Le Gon shows her own expertise, easily keeping step with Robinson. Le Gon appears briefly in male garb, like Eleanor Powell.
As usual for films of Hollywood's classic era, there are some treasures in the cast here. Pert Kelton is less annoying than usual, speaking in a normal voice (for once). She performs a dance number which is intentionally inept, to good effect. Lionel Stander is good here, but would have been better if he weren't lumbered with an accent more appropriate for Gregory Ratoff or Leonid Kinskey. But the real find is Thurston Hall. A prolific character actor who appeared in literally hundreds of films, Hall usually played blustering millionaires. Here, he plays a Vitamin Flintheart-style "ack-torr" of the old school, and he practically steals the movie. Why didn't Hall get more chances like this? Georgia Caine, as a Margaret Dumont-style dowager, is excellent here in her scenes with Hall. (I kept waiting for some reference to 'Hall Caine'.)
The plot of this musical is nothing much. I was surprised to learn that Bradford Ropes worked on the dialogue of this movie. Ropes, a former chorus boy and stage actor, wrote the backstage novel that inspired the film '42nd Street': he was an expert at realistic showbiz dialogue and cynical wisecracks. I can't imagine what he contributed to this lacklustre movie. At least one cliché was avoided here: for once, we see a chanteuse (Ann Sothern) who has to clean up her own dressing room, instead of relying on a chucklin' black maidservant.
One of the delights of films from Hollywood's studio era is the frequent tendency for some obscure actor to be given a piece of business or a line of dialogue which makes him stand out. Here, an actor named Monte Vandergrift (who?) has precisely one line of dialogue ... but his delivery earns him one of the biggest laughs in the movie.
The songs? Forget it. They're all pretty bad, but Waller, Robinson and Le Gon transcend their weak material through sheer force of talent. Also, we get a chance to study Fats Waller's fingerwork on the keyboard ... but not while he's playing his trademark 'stride' piano style. There are minor pleasures throughout 'Hooray for Love', and I'll rate this movie 5 out of 10.
