Dancing Lady (1933)
Dancing Lady on the IMDb
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Warner Brothers, Available individually or as part
of the Clark Gable Signature Collection.
Joan Crawford,
Clark Gable, Franchot Tone, Ted Healy, Winnie Lightner, Fred
Astaire, The Three Stooges, May Robson, Nelson Eddy.
The Gable Collection had been sitting in my Amazon cart for a couple of months, so I made sure to buy it as soon as it was released to take advantage of the discounted price. I began my viewing with Dancing Lady because it was the only one of the films that I had never seen before. Actually before I had received the set I had confused Dancing Lady with 1931's Dance, Fools, Dance (also starring Crawford and Gable, but not included with this set), and so was happy to begin the Gable set here, in the beginning, even if this really is more of a Joan Crawford vehicle.
It's been a couple of weeks from the time I watched Dancing Lady until now as I write this, but I did watch it twice within a 24 hour period, so I think it's stuck pretty well in my head.
First, a note on the casting -- when I was reading the case before I put the movie on to watch for the first time it occurred to me that this was a pretty strange gathering of names. Even after watching it my impression is that the MGM casting crew sat around saying to one another, well, we have this Astaire guy we need to get into a movie, and hey Nelson Eddy could sing a song, and well, what about Healy and the Stooges? Hmm, Gable's on the rise and it'd be pretty neat to pair him with Crawford, she's not busy right now, right? And oh, let's throw that Franchot Tone kid in the mix too! Could somebody top off my drink? But the funny thing is, even though it seems like the cast was just thrown together, selected blindly from a roster list, for some reason, well, because of the star quality, it works! This is a fun movie!
Personally, I enjoyed Ted Healy and the Three Stooges most of all because
this was actually the first time I ever have seen the Stooges working with
Healy. Even better the disc includes two shorts as extras, one titled
Plane Nuts with Healy and the Stooges 
and another titled Roast Beef &
Movies with Curly with two other comedians from back then. The shorts
were just kind of silly, but Plane Nuts does include a couple of lines
that must have been early Stooge catch-phrases as they were also featured in
Dancing Lady. It was kind of interesting to see Moe more as an equal
to Larry and Curly while all three worked under Healy's shadow in every respect.
Fred Astaire is making is film debut in Dancing Lady, but doesn't do much other than sing and, of course, dance (with Joan). Similarly, Nelson Eddy is only here to sing a song towards the very end of the film. May Robson's part is also small, but it's pretty funny and won't disappoint.
Joan Crawford plays Janie Barlow, a down and out burlesque dancer, who just lives to dance and is looking for her big break. Franchot Tone is cocky but likeable Tod Newton, who's filthy rich and does his best to try and help Janie, unbeknownst to her, all in the name of courting her. Gable is Patch Gallagher, a big-time producer of musicals, who does his best to come off as a tyrant, but of course also falls for Janie, aka Duchess. As was typical with these Golden Age giants, everyone is playing their usual type acting just the way you would expect them to act, except time gives us the added benefit of reading heat into every scene since we know all about Joan and Gable and are just a couple of years away from Crawford becoming Mrs. Franchot Tone.
As you might expect, there's a good deal of song and dance mixed into the comedy and romance, but Dancing Lady does not qualify as a great musical, comedy, or romance. Quite honestly if they remade it today I would have zero interest. What it is is a grab-bag providing us with a few of the strongest personalities in film history all at one time, each star grabbing all of your attention for every second that they have the camera's attention.
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