On Your Toes

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.

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!

While the disappointment is real that the superior SONG score for Rodgers and Hart's groundbreaking ballet musical has been relegated largely to the background for the film adaptation made just three years after its Broadway triumph, what remains is remarkably faithful (despite the numerous ham hands which tinkered in the book adaptation) and a joy thanks to the bountiful supply of studio character actors lavished on the project.

As most faithful Rodgers and Hart fans are aware, this musical was originally written for the movies, but the studios, in their wisdom, passed, and our heroes took their script to Broadway where it triumphed, introducing not only a fine song score, but two plot advancing ballets (the "Princess Zenobia" and the "Slaughter on Tenth Avenue") which survived the show and entered the regular ballet repertoire as well as being preserved HERE in essentially their original Balanchine choreography (and even the original stage costumes!). This co-mingling of ballet and musical theatre would lead eventually to the Agnes DeMille "dream ballets" in OKLAHOMA! less than a decade later without the pretext of a ballet company to justify them.

For the Warner Brothers' film, Balanchine's soon-to-be wife, Vera Zorina was elevated to her first lead (she would repeat the assignment in the less successful 1954 Broadway revival which unwisely cut the early "Vaudeville" framing scene during the run!). While the 1954 cuts MAY have been in deference to getting to the perceived "name" lead sooner, it would be a mistake to think that any such tinkering was made in 1939 for that reason. ON YOUR TOES was always a theatrical oddity where the leading lady DANCED but did not sing!

This musical oddity was more than balanced by the casting of stalwart Rodgers and Hart song and dance man, Eddie Albert, in the movie lead as the vaudevillian-turned-ballet-composer. While not allowed to sing this time around (a later generation who knew him only from his TV shenanigans on GREEN ACRES would be astounded that he ever did!), he dances solidly and understands the material implicitly.

While the "Zenobia" ballet has been slightly shortened for the film, the central costume joke of the last minute replacement is still there. When the show was revived in 1985 to remarkable success, the piece was kept semi-politically correct by making the part - a Nubian slave - BLUE rather than black. In 1939, the benignly racist overtones of the joke were left intact - possibly even augmented, but the point is really not race but theatricality, and the ballet remains enjoyable for exactly the loving satire it is . . . and the "Slaughter on Tenth Avenue" ballet is stunning in all it's glory.

The musical may appeal more to those with a taste for 30's mysteries and high style than "modern" reality and grit, but if you have a fondness for Rodgers and Hart at their most deceptively adventurous, it remains a must see - and even a must-listen for those wonderful songs that survive in the background.

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.