Dancing Sweeties

Bill (Grant Withers) always danced with Jazzbo (Edna Murphy) until he meets Molly (Sue Carol). Who are these actors ? No-one knows. Not the first string actors of the day, which is why they don't show this one often. Only 100 votes on imdb currently. Bill and Molly hit it off right away, but will their dancing be as good as their romancing? This one is clearly a musical, so there's lot of singing by the actors and others. I'm not a big fan of musicals, so I would have preferred they used that money to spiff up the script, but what do i know? It's plain and simple, and over quickly, so i guess it all works out. Original story Three Flights up by Harry Freid. Directed by Ray Enright; directed from the 1920s up into the 1950s.

Bill Cleaver (Grant Withers) is an expert dancer and he meets Molly (Sue Carol) at the dance club on the night of the big dance contest. They strike up a friendship and soon become partners....and end up winning the contest. However, something weird and unexpected happens next. It seems the dance club has planned a wedding that night as a publicity stunt...and the pair who are planning on marrying back out and it looks like the wedding is off. But Molly and Bill hate their living situations...and the couple who marry are to receive all sorts of wedding presents...including a home!! So, they impulsively decide to marry...and as you'd expect, their marriage is indeed problematic! What's next? See the film.

Despite having second-tier actors, the film is entertaining and enjoyable. However, "Dancing Sweeties" is a film that was later remade...though for the life of me I cannot remember the name of the remake and IMDB doesn't list this information on the page for "Dancing Sweeties"...but I clearly remember the same plot in another film. If you can remember the name of the remake, please drop me a line!

There is at least one reason to watch bad films, especially old ones.

So much in life is the result of odd quirks of evolution, or happenstance if you prefer. All the things we are surrounded by seem as natural as sunlight and the only way they could be. But we live in a world where the stilted possibilities so outweigh the lucky happenstance that it is amazing we can stand it.

Movies are a small cosmos we create as our own gods and they behave the same way. So what we watch and how our visual imagination works is largely accidental. You can see some of the broken paths in old films. These reflect the "what might have beens" of the real world and are the real nodes of extinct possibilities in movies.

And when it is a dance movie, so much the better, because film and dance have been on- again off-again sweethearts from the beginning to now. And perhaps no romance in film has been more passionate but constrained than this.

Now. This movie, a vitaphone from the first real year of talkies is an interesting find. The story is simple and staged as a play except for the dance scenes. That story would be unacceptably simple and direct today: a guy is a dancing fool who cannot live without spending nights at the local dance hall competing. The text after the title sequence assures us that such passionate folk exist.

The girl is a simple, ordinary type, interested in building a home and family. By the thinnest of devices, they meet, marry and events transpire as expected. (Dance loses, family wins.)

And that's what happens in the movie proper. Dance is left by the wayside. In fact, except for the title sequence and a bit in the middle where our players watch a Charleston-type group, the dance is a matter of talking about it and some amazingly ungraceful boxstep.

What prompted me to this was seeing "Take the Lead," the newest dance movie as I write this. In a way, these are two ends of two family trees that still hasn't found the perfect mating.

Sigh.

Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.

under the credits. It then settles into a routine comedy about a young man (Grant Withers) who is obsessed with dancing and marries a girl (Sue Carol) he meets at a dance. The usual domestic squabbles arise. Good support from silent comedienne Kate Price as well as Edna Murphy, Eddie Phillips & Sid Silvers. The girl who dances during the opening credits can also be spotted in the film. I wonder who she is?

Some of the themes of They Shoot Horses Don't They are found in this contemporary film of the early talkies about dance contests. Dancing Sweeties is about a boy and girl who have dancing on their minds 24/7.

The young couple are Grant Withers and Sue Carol. After a while though Carol wants to settle down, but Withers is a dancing and in many ways other kinds of a fool.

The song The Kiss Waltz was introduced here, but over all I'd say the film hasn't worn well with age.

Grant Withers was the first husband of Loretta Young. As for Sue Carol she got out of acting and became an agent. Her best known client was her husband Alan Ladd. But that was year's down the road.

If you like museum pieces, this is your movie.