On Your Toes

There's really only reason why you'd find, rent, and sit through On Your Toes: if you love the dancing talents of ballerina Vera Zorina. She plays a ballerina and is given several scenes to shine. If you're just looking for a showbiz movie about the ups and downs of trying to have a stage career, look elsewhere.

The movie starts out in vaudeville, where James Gleason, Queenie Smith, and Donald O'Connor have a dancing act. Little Donald is absolutely adorable, but he's only in the movie for about fifteen minutes. Then he grows up, and gets replaced by Eddie Albert-fresh off Broadway and in his second-ever film-and the film turns into a bizarre Russian ballet. Eddie leaves vaudeville to pursue classical music, then he connects with Vera, Leonid Kinskey, Frank McHugh, and a strangely accented Alan Hale. The rest of the movie is very odd, full of ballet, and hardly any plot. I was hoping to see more of Eddie Albert singing and dancing, but he didn't get to show off his hidden talents. During the one scene he's shown tap dancing, the camera only shows his feet after a very obvious stunt double enters the frame from the opposite direction Eddie left.

On Your Toes was one of Richard Rodgers&Lorenz Hart's best Broadway musicals and a landmark show in that it was one of the first to integrate ballet into the plot. Georges Balanchine did the choreography for the production that ran 315 performances in the 1936- 1937 season and was responsible for making Ray Bolger a star and getting him to Hollywood through MGM.

So when they were buying Bolger why didn't Louis B. Mayer buy the show as well? Because of that and probably because Mayer was asking too much for Bolger for Jack Warner, Eddie Albert was put in the lead.

But if we couldn't get Bolger, Jack Warner had the best guy possible for the role of Philip Dolan, III. I can't believe James Cagney didn't lobby like a madman for this role with Warner. He'd have much preferred to do this instead of The Oklahoma Kid or The Roaring Twenties, classic Cagney parts that they are.

The big hit of On Your Toes was the instrumental ballet Slaughter On Tenth Avenue, the music was played everywhere in the late Thirties. It is the center piece of the film as well, it has to be because such Rodgers&Hart classics as There's A Small Hotel and Quiet Nights are only heard as background music. The only other song which was to demonstrate Albert as vaudeville hoofer was Oh You Beautiful Doll.

I think it's a miracle that On Your Toes came out as good as it did on screen with an emasculation of the Rodgers&Hart score and the fact that the best guy on the lot for the part was passed over if they couldn't get the guy who introduced it on stage. The Brothers Warner did field some of their best character actors with such people as Frank McHugh, Leonid Kinskey, Alan Hale, and Erik Rhodes in the cast. A film that has these four guys in it has something going for it.

Vera Zorina plays the prima ballerina who it turns out knew Albert as a lad back in vaudeville days. Her ballet numbers do remain intact and show why she was THE ballerina back in the day.

But what a classic this would have been if James Cagney had done the lead and more Rodgers&Hart had been retained.

ON YOUR TOES (1939) is MORE important than THE RED SHOES (1948) ON YOUR TOES (1939) starring Vera Zorina (1917 - 2003) and Eddie Albert (doing the Gene Kelly part in SLAUGHTER ON 10th AVENUE ballet) is the most important ballet movie ever made. More important than the excellent, more famous movie titled THE RED SHOES (1948) starring Moira Shearer.

Get it from RobertsVideos.Com in Canada.

It's more important, better than the very good, justifiably honored RED SHOES (1948) movie.

Nobody interested in ballet in the movies can ignore ON YOUR TOES (1939) or why it was "disappeared" in 1939, the most important year in Hollywood movie history! Zorina was a Berlin, Germany born ballet dancer (big problem in Hollywood in 1939), and was married to George Ballanchine until 1946 when he married Maria Tallchief.

She married Goddard Lieberson (head of Columbia Records), had two sons with him, stayed married until his death in 1977.

She went on to be the head of an important ballet company in Norway.

She died in 2003 at the age of 86 of "unknown causes." She was a brilliant stage actress who originated the stage role in the 1930's of I MARRIED AN ANGEL (Jeanette MacDonald was the star of the movie version).

Her guileless style of acting shows up brilliantly in ON YOUR TOES (1939).

See it, get it, pay for it (RobertsVideos.Com isn't cheap!).

Thank you!

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David Roger "Tex" Allen, retired SAG-AFTRA movie actor...too old to work, too young to die!

Except for the wonderful musical arrangement of "Slaughter on Tenth Avenue", the choreography looks less than inspired as danced by VERA ZORINA and EDDIE ALBERT. Especially if one has seen Gene Kelly and Vera-Ellen do the number in a fantastic musical highlight from WORDS AND MUSIC. And the less said about the weak comedy routines, the better.

The only compensations in this weak transfer from stage to screen (in which "There's A Small Hotel" has been relegated to background music), is the pleasant cast. Eddie Albert is his usual charming self, gifted at comedy and easily stealing most of the scenes with his nonchalant genius for comic roles. Vera Zorina demonstrates that she could act, when called upon, but her role is the stereotyped diva in distress that any capable actress could do with her eyes shut.

Alan Hale, Leonid Kinskey, Donald O'Connor (as a boy hoofer), and Frank McHugh do their standard professional jobs in assorted light comedy roles--but despite their flair, most of the one-liners fall flat.

Surely, this was a more exciting event on Broadway than it appears in its screen incarnation with Ray Bolger appearing opposite Vera Zorina. Too little time expended on a worthwhile script and too many songs missing from the original stage musical. The result is a routine backstage musical with only the "Slaughter" ballet to redeem it.

Vera Zorina, Eddie Albert, Alan Hale, Jr., Frank McHugh, Leonid Kinskey, Donald O'Connor, and James Gleason star in "On Your Toes," a 1939 film based on the Broadway show of the same name, which starred Ray Bolger and had music and lyrics by Rogers and Hart. If you think you hear "There's a Small Hotel" in the background throughout this film, you are - it was one of the songs in the musical that is not performed here. Since the star is Vera Zorina, the song omissions are presumably because she wasn't a singer. You'd think Hollywood just never dubbed anyone or just never assigned a song to a different character.

At any rate, if you forget the original show, what's left is actually entertaining, with Albert playing Phil Dolan, Jr., a young hoofer turned composer who writes "Slaughter on Tenth Avenue." The two dance sections, "Princess Zenobia" and "Slaughter" are the highlights of the film, with Slaughter very importantly shown with the original Balanchine choreography.

The other highlight for me was seeing a young Donald O'Connor, who plays the Phil as a young boy in vaudeville - he's delightful.

Some trivia: the head of the ballet company, played here by Alan Hale, Jr., was played on Broadway by Monty Wooley.