On dance as acting in Hollywood musicals.

I don't know anything about dance. I barely made it through the obligatory years of childhood ballet, and I can't tell a rumba from zumba. But I go to the ballet from time to time, and I have seen a lot of musicals -- some on the stage, some independent, some foreign, some more recent, but mostly, as with my movie knowledge in general, Hollywood productions from before 1960. I was raised to. My little sister claims to have thought, in the first grade (c. 1995), that Fred Astaire was the biggest movie star in the world; certainly she earned a laugh at Madame Tussaud's by asking where they kept their waxen Fred Astaire. ("In the basement, maybe, if it's still around ...") I've seen most of the movies whose songs reappear in "Singin' in the Rain," and been baffled on Broadway to see numbers from "Gold Diggers of 1933" (I think ... I think "We're in the Money") appear in a production of "42nd St." Of course I have seen movie musicals from the '60s and '70s -- the memorably bad "Daddy-O" (MST3K), "Don't Knock the Rock," and "Don't Knock the Twist" (TCM) besides "Jailhouse Rock" and "A Hard Day's Night" and "The Producers" and "Cabaret." But "musical" isn't a genre, unless (and maybe this is so) a single formal constraint can make a genre. Maybe any book whose plot depends on a crime is crime fiction, whether it's spooky, cozy, or lurid in tone, whether the prose is lush, spare, unprepossessing, funny or not, demanding or not, whether the story revolves around plot or character or atmosphere or message or something else, whether we know whodunit from the start or not until the last paragraph on the last page, whether it's an investigator's-eye or perpetrator's-eye-view, whether the end frightens, unsettles, baffles, or reassures us. And maybe "Duck Soup" and "Some Like It Hot" and "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg" and "Team America: World Police" do belong to the same genre in the way relevant to this discussion. Maybe "The Long Goodbye" is sufficiently haunted by its theme music, or "Psycho" and "The Graduate" and "The Big Lebowski" sufficiently dominated by their soundtracks, to count, or border on counting. It's okay with me. But I'm talking about Hollywood musicals of the so-called Golden Age. The kind that flourished under the studio system, and at MGM in particular -- from "The Jazz Singer" through "The Bandwagon." The kind Busby Berkeley choreographed, the kind that produced long-term star pairings like Maurice Chevalier/Jeanette MacDonald, Jeanette MacDonald/Nelson Eddy, Ruby Keeler/Dick Powell, Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers, Gene Kelly/Cyd Charisse. The kind you associate with Lena Horne and Judy Garland and Howard Keel, with Cole Porter and Irving Berlin, with Warren & Dubin and Rodgers & Hammerstein or Hart. The kind whose lavish choreography and intimate musical confession we most often see, now, in Walt Disney products. The kind "Singin' in the Rain" epitomizes and glamorizes. You'd know it when you saw it.

Well, although I am not especially interested with dance I find myself entranced by the dancing in many of these musicals. Of course I could never say no to a surreally symmetrical Busby Berkeley lady-flower transforming into an electrically-lit lady-guitar via overhead, underwater, and upskirt shots, of course, but what I want to think about here is dancing as acting, not dancing as auteur-ial vision. Berkeley has this way of using body parts, including even very close close-ups of faces, to distract from the humanness of wholes. When the dance does focus on a single individual, even she will be not whole and single but distortedly mirrored everywhere, as Ruby Keeler is in "I Only Have Eyes for You" from "Dames." There's something profoundly actor-undermining at work there. I'm sure the people who work on Berkeley's influence on the brilliant Nazi documentarian Leni Riefenstahl have lots to say about it. Charming as Keeler is, and as good a dancer as she is, her dancing is dispensable. Not so with the kind of dancing I mean.

There is one paradigm of indispensable dancing in a Busby Berkeley movie: Jimmy Cagney in "Footlight Parade." He's featured in only one number, but while he moves Cagney is never not dancing. That his character is a workaholic dance creator is utterly plausible, since he seems even whilst immobile never not to be thinking of dancing. His dancing isn't as athletic as Gene Kelly's and it isn't as natural as Fred Astaire's. It isn't as abstractly expressive as Kelly's or as emotionally integrated as Astaire's. But it's extraordinary. As Garbo seemed simply to have more muscles in her face than other actors did, and finer-grained control of every visible bit of her, Cagney appears to have a double-jointed waist, if such were possible. His shoulders, hips, and feet can stand firm while everything in between jumps out. I once would have described the intense, effortless smoothness of his motion as "liquid." It isn't. Nor willowy. There's too much power there. He would clearly not bend with the remover to remove, nor alter when he alteration finds. He moves as though he were a set of muscles on an impossibly flexible skeleton. It's not liquid. It's serpentine.

I'm curious that he doesn't seem like a dancer when he plays a gangster. He's versatile enough, of course, but that kind and that degree of freedom of motion don't come and go with roles. And he did intersperse dance and criminal roles a bit throughout his career. But he doesn't seem interested in presenting dangerous grace in either sort of film. That might be a very great pity.