Danse autour de la vie

For all the new scholarship about this neglected actress, people still need to see her in action. Yes-- let's accept the fact that, by 1942, Norma Shearer was past caring about a career in the movies, and let's take this romp for what it is: fun, vibrant, and a showcase for Norma. Her penultimate film brings out her exquisite comic timing, and her bursts of Polish round out the very amusing character of Vicky. Realize that Norma is winking at the camera and her public all through this film, asking only that we accept it on its terms: a fun exercise to help finish out her career (though there is evidence that she, in retrospect, didn't care much for it).

For me, the plot of "We Were Dancing" is a very hard sell. I think that I am unique about this, as I didn't notice this same problem in other reviews. Here's the problem. Melvyn Douglas and Norma Shearer play people who are hard to like at the onset--at least for me. They are both nobels with no income and spend their lives sponging off people...as professional houseguests. The notion of them being, essentially, well-bred leeches was a very difficult thing...I automatically disliked them and felt they should be slapped and told to get jobs! I know...not everyone had that reaction to the movie. Perhaps you will not.

When the story begins, Princess Wilomirska (Shearer) breaks off her engagement to a rich man in order to marry a guy she just met, Baron Prax (Douglas). Neither has an income and although they marry, they pretend to others they haven't in order to keep themselves 'available'--hence ensuring suitors will let them stay in their homes! This is pretty awful....and eventually their ruse is discovered*. As a result, they might have to find another way to live as choice invitations to stay begin to dry up. Could this mean, horror of horrors, actually getting jobs and living like the common people?!

This is a well acted and highly polished film from MGM. It's slick and well made...and also a film I just didn't like because the people starring in it played parasites. Sorry...just not a film I can endorse.





*The reveal is VERY post-code. They are caught in a bedroom in SEPARATE beds...not exactly naughty nor realistic...but also due to one of the sillier requirements of the Production Code era.

This film, "We Were Dancing" from 1942 is a combination of two Noel Coward plays, and neither one was his best work.

The film stars Norma Shearer and Melvin Douglas, with a good supporting cast including Gail Patrick, Lee Bowman, Alan Mowbray, Connie Gilchrist, Norma Varden, Reginald Owen, and Marjorie Main.

Norma Shearer, with a blondish wig, plays Princess Victoria 'Vicki' Wilomirska who, when she gets excited, spouts outrageous Polish. At her engagement party (she is to marry the Lee Bowman character), she dances with Baron Nicholas Prax (Douglas) and they fall in love immediately. She breaks her engagement and marries the Baron.

The profession of these two is that of houseguests. They wander from place to place staying in the homes of socially ambitious people, usually Americans, who like the pedigree.

It's the usual break up to make up scenario.

Norma's big problem was that she couldn't get out of the '30s, and without her husband around, she couldn't choose films either. She obviously was concerned about her age and unfortunately, she had a right to - at 40, she was about 10 years past the age where most leading ladies in those days actually were leading ladies and not character actors. It's a shame, because she would have done so well in other films more appropriate for her.

This film has the same problem as "Her Cardboard Lover" - it came out at the wrong time, when this type of film had come and gone, and people were looking to more serious films or films that put the war into the story: "Mrs. Miniver," "The More the Merrier," "A Yank in the RAF," etc.

Norma Shearer was a hard-working, dedicated actress, but her ego got in the way of her final film choices. If only she had stopped with the wonderful "Escape" -- but she didn't.

This is one time I will grant that the movie success of the 1939 comedy, "Ninotchka," might have influenced a Hollywood decision for another film - this one by MGM. The earlier film involved displaced European royalty, and this one has some of the same. And, of course, Melvyn Douglas was the male lead in that first comedy. But then, the differences leap out. Where the 1939 film was a satire with a timely plot and a fantastic screenplay, "We Were Dancing" is untimely and with a bland screenplay.

This is set in the third year of World War II and the first that the U.S. was involved. The idea that two former aristocrats as perpetual traveling house guests might be funny escaped the movie-going public of the time. And these decades later it escapes one for the simple reason that the script is flat. Where is the clever dialog, with the witticisms and the funny lines that Douglas was so excellent at? Where is the subtle, cute and zinger-loaded dialog that Norma Shearer could utter so well?

This film has none of that and very little of anything about it. It struck me as more of a drama and love story. I had to stretch to give this film six stars, and that's solely for the first-rate cast that it has. Beside the two leads, this film is loaded with top supporting actors of the day - Florence Bates, Lee Bowman, Marjorie Main, Alan Mowbray, Reginald Owen and Gail Patrick. Indeed, Marjorie Main's Judge Sidney Hawkes is the only funny role in the film, and the only one that will get some laughs.

With that cast, I doubt that MGM covered its budget. It's $1.7 million box office was near the bottom for the year - at 137th. At least one other reviewer to date called this film "boring." It may well be that to most audiences in modern times. It came close for this film aficionado. The only thing that kept it from slipping that low was the cast of various top supporting characters who kept popping in and out at times.

This is a pleasant little comedy but a minor work coming as it does from Noel Coward. Perhaps his name on the script was part of Norma's decision to participate in this instead of the other films offered that she rejected to do this one. It certainly has an estimable cast: Melvyn Douglas an expert as this sort of fluffy comedy, Gail Patrick and Lee Bowman both able performers and a handful, Connie Gilchrist, Marjorie Main, Norma Varden, Alan Mowbray, Florence Bates etc., of the best character actors MGM had under contract. The main problem with this and perhaps part of the reason it tanked on initial release is that even all dressed up in fancy 40's fashions this is a relic of the sort of drawing room confections that were popular a decade earlier and had fallen out of favor by the war years. Unfortunately without Irving Thalberg's strong guiding hand to pick the right properties for her Norma's script sense failed her. She had done well with her previous film "Escape" but would blunder again with her follow up to this her last film "Her Cardboard Lover". Still taken as is without all the back story an enjoyable trifle but unmemorable.