Princesse Tam-Tam

Josephine Baker was one of the most remarkable women of the 20th century. Talented and beautiful, she moved away from the racially segregated US to find her fortune in Paris, where she became the highest paid entertainer in Europe for many years. She mostly worked in the nightclub scene, singing and dancing, but she did make a few films. If all those films were as uninspired as Princess Tam Tam (1935), it's easy to see why she got bored with cinema so quickly.

Baker is the only entertaining aspect of the film. She's charming and funny, and steals every frame she appears in. Her co-stars leave little impression, partly due to having to share the screen with Baker and partly due to their characters being dull, or worse, that deadly combination of unlikable and annoying. The story is a pale retread of Pygmalion and even though the movie doesn't even last an hour and a half, it seems to go on forever. There's even a Busby Berkely style dance number at the end which may be the most obvious use of narrative padding I've ever seen.

A poor script combined with choppy camera-work makes this mostly uninspired viewing. However, Baker's performance makes it worth a single watch, and it makes you wish the producers and writers had given her better material to work with.

The key to fully enjoying this film is to forget for a few minutes that it's a vehicle for Josephine Baker, and view it as a French version of a screwball comedy. Apart from the grafted-on Pygmalion theme, the script is really about war between husband and wife.

From that perspective it's really as good as than many similar films produced by Hollywood during the same era. The viewer can then have fun comparing the Gallic take on the theme with the American and English approaches.

The production dance number is clearly an imitation of Busby Berkeley, and nowhere near as lavish. But enjoyable enough in its own rights. Again, the fun is in comparing the French choreographer's way of doing things with Berkeley. And ... think about it for a minute ... did French chorus lines at that (or any) time really have tap dancing?

Then go back to thinking about Josephine Baker. It's a shame she didn't get to dance more, but the dance to Sous Le Ciel and the Samba in the final number were quite good.

I see that the 11 previous reviews of this movie here vary considerably, from positive to negative. That reflects this movie, frankly, which has good things and bad.

Baker plays a young African woman living in (white) North Africa. She is "civilized" by a French novelist, somewhat the way Henry Higgens trains Eliza Doolittle, but here in order to get back at his wife in France, whom he suspects of cheating on him, in other words for strictly selfish reasons. In the end, when he wins back his wife - in a completely unconvincing scene - he forgets all about Baker.

The viewer can't forget Baker, though, because she is really the center of the movie. She plays a naive but not stupid young woman who is perfectly happy living day to day in the simple fashion of those with few material goods. She accepts what is given her, but she prefers to dance barefoot in her own rather wild - but not particularly erotic - manner, rather than to worry about the steps of the latest French dance style.

So the movie is really about the clash of two civilizations. It ends with Baker, back in Africa, happily wedded to a (white) Arab, living a simple life again. Nothing in the movie makes that look foolish or ignorant. Neither does the movie try to make that lifestyle look superior to the sophisticated lives of well-to-do Parisians of the 1930s. They are just two very different, and basically incompatible, cultures. And there the movie leaves it.

Baker gets to sing a few pleasant but not really memorable songs. Her dancing is more frenetic than graceful. Some French folk are depicted as admiring it, others as ridiculing it. The movie really doesn't take sides. Since we don't have much movie footage of Baker performing from the 1920s and 30s, it's hard to say how representative, if at all, this is of the sort of thing she was doing in Paris theaters at the time.

Not a bad movie, and not really a racist one - though it certainly has racist characters in it.

....but the parts she was offered were really poor."Princesse Tam-Tam" directed by third-rate artist Edmond Greville is no exception.On the plus side,there is a screenplay and even an unexpected twist at the end.It reminds me of "Pygmalion" sometimes as one user has already pointed out.

But the main reason is to show Baker in the music hall where she belongs.There's a long scene there and it may bore people who do not like this kind of show.

There's no real racism,but the natives from Africa are looked upon as "big children" by the white man .Who could blame the script writers? In Hergé's comic strip "Tintin au Congo" ,at the beginning of the thirties ,it was all the same.

Until now the most weaker picture of Josephine Baker, apart this was made on mid thirties where they usually didn't make a lavish production, as show on it, something about a fairy tale, the plot is rubbish, serving as Baker's vehicle to explore an African dancing or criticize a usual shallow of the European society, decaying to my point of view, a bit humor all around. largely used it's time, wasn't a movie to remember too often, a dry production, lack of deepness of being thinking is quite absurd, poor attempt to make something unusual, perhaps to Josephine Baker's fans only!!!

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First watch: 2019 / How many: 1 / Source: DVD / Rating: 6.25