Stormy Weather

A minor part of the American war effort, 1943's Stormy Weather is an all-Black musical revue.  Set in a surreal world that is without Caucasians (or, indeed, any race other than Black), the film features jaw-dropping song and dance performances, some of the routines in entertainment genres that I didn't recognize and that don't have names (at least, as far as I know).  Despite the exuberance of the performers, the film inadvertently documents careers thwarted by racism and seems to me to be oddly sad.  One is left with a distinct sense of melancholy -- the artists in the film deserve better than they get:  the script is weak and vague, the characters are caricatures, and the song and dance numbers are rather indifferently staged, without the hallucinatory and rapturous camera-work and art direction featured in Big Budget mainstream Hollywood musicals of the era.  The direction is poor to non-existent with the camera often stalled in a corner somewhere viewing the action from an inexpressive angle. Furthermore, the film seems oddly cramped and rushed -- it has about 20 full-blown song-and-dance routines in a movie that is only 77 minutes long.  Despite these flaws, you should seek out this movie and study it:  the film documents a number of performances that are without parallel in American cinema.

Set in a all-Black alternative universe, the film doesn't address racial issues -- there's only one race in existence.  (Reportedly, FDR wanted the movie made to encourage Blacks to serve in the military.)  The all-Black world parodies the all-White world of conventional Depression and World War Two era musicals -- there are crooners, torch-singers surrounded by hordes of handsome men in tuxedos, low-down juke joints, and ultra-elegant ballrooms with smarmy, if picturesque, men directing big bands. The film is  a revue -- that is, a series of performances strung together on an exceedingly tenuous plot.  Stormy Weather is ambitious in scope -- it sets out to document performance styles in Black song and dance between the end of World War One and the beginning of the second Great War and spans this period of time.  The film starts with the mail being delivered to an idyllic cottage somewhere in the country.  Bill Williamson (Bill "Bojangles" Robinson) lives in the cottage and we see him entertaining a passel of cute children ("chillun" he calls them), teaching the little boys and girls to tap dance on his front stoop.  The children call Williamson their grandpa and are impressed to see his face on a glossy magazine celebrating the "monumental contributions of Negro artists to American civilization."  They ask him to tell them about his life in show-business and the film, then, departs from this frame to flashback to 1918 and a parade welcoming American servicemen back from the Great War.  Williamson with his buddy Gabe (comic relief) were musicians in an army band and they are headed uptown to Harlem for a Ball.  At the Ball, Williamson meets Selena Rogers (Lena Horne), a glamorous singer with the slick Chick Bailey's Big Band.  Gabe is treating his girlfriend to a night on the town, although he has only four dollars in his pocket and the woman likes "a big spender".  He gets into trouble, running out of cash when the girl orders champagne, and Gabe's extravagant plans always lead to money-problems, although he's a lucky man and can wriggle out from under his debts.  After an extravagant (and spectacularly racist) Cakewalk number, Williamson departs for Memphis where we next see him working as a waiter at a juke-joint called Ada's -- the house pianist is Fats Waller.  Selena is performing in Memphis and, after the show, she drops into Ada's bar.  After some song and dance numbers in the bar, Selena persuades Chick to hire everyone on hand to join his Big Band revue.  Selena likes Bill and this enrages Chick who mistreats and humiliates him.  He makes him dress as a jungle boy and sit on the trunk of a cardboard elephant playing bongo drums.  After some more numbers, Bill punches Chick and departs the show with Selena.  He and Selena becomes famous on Broadway and Bill proposes to her.  He has, in fact, already hired an architect to make a sketch of the dream cottage where they will live and raise their family.  (It's the set where we saw Bill in the first shot with all the children.)  Selena isn't willing to give up her career to marry Bill and they break up.  Bill is managing a Broadway revue and has trouble with the chorus-girls who want a raise (and haven't been paid for their last show).  Going to Harlem for a "shine" (shoeshine), Bill runs into his old war-buddy, Gabe, who is now a bootblack.  Bill knows Gabe is a big talker and so he recruits him to mislead the chorus-girls into thinking that the show has a powerful financier who will pay their wages.  (This subplot, which is very sparsely developed, is rather mean-spirited and incongruous -- after all, why shouldn't the hard-working chorus girls get paid?)    Someone recognizes Gabe as the Harlem shoe-shine man and the girl's thrash him, but all problems are resolved when a limousine driver reports that his boss made a lot of money gambling on horses, paid him a huge tip which he uses to settle the dispute with the girls.  The action shifts to the cottage that Bill had designed as his love-nest for Selena.  We learn to our considerable dismay that Bill and Selena never got back together and all the little kids are just "neighbors" -- apparently, Bill is living alone in retirement in the cottage.  Cab Calloway shows up and urges Bill to perform at a revue downtown to "support the troops."  "Anything for the soldiers," Bill says and he appears with Calloway's Big Band in several numbers.  Selena performs "Stormy Weather" and the film embraces a genre convention -- the fourth act extended ballet that starts on stage and, then, roams across vast sound sets and spectacular production numbers only to return to the theater in which the number is set.  Normally, films of this sort have a short coda tying up plot points.  There is no narrative coda in this film -- rather, the movie ends with an astonishing dance sequence called "Jumpin' Jive" featuring the Nicholas Brothers.  By unanimous opinion, this is the most remarkable tap-dance performance ever shown on film -- Fred Astaire said that it was the greatest thing that he had ever scene and Mikhail Baryshnikov agreed that this was the best dance scene ever produced.  Gregory Hines, the modern tap dancer, says that there is no one alive today who could do what the Nicholas Brothers do in this sequence -- even an attempt to replicate some of their stunts would likely result in serious injury and "computer animation" would have to deployed to reprise this scene.  You probably need someone with expertise to guide you through the dance-number because the performers are so preternaturally gifted that nothing that they do seems difficult -- it all flows with remarkable ease.  In one part of the dance scene, the brothers jump on stacks of boxes in the band, leaping up at each level about a yard and landing on one foot only while never losing the rhythm of the tap dancing.  It looks supremely easy until you try to imagine the difficulty of keeping your balance while lunging upward three feet at a time through a forest of (rather fearful-looking) saxophones and trumpet.  At the climax, the boys dive down a huge flight of steps, each leap-frogging over the other and dropping five or six feet vertically to land in splits.  From the splits, they surge upward and repeat the maneuver until they have descended something  like 25 feet to the stage floor.  A commentator on the sequence notes that the dancers rise up to their feet to execute the next jump without using their hands for support --somehow, they simply close their legs from the split levering them up into the air.  None of the experts who have seen this can figure out exactly how they manage to regain their feet without pushing up with their hands -- as far as professional dancers are concerned, the maneuver is physically impossible, although no one will even attempt to duplicate the stunt because dropping into a full split after leaping over someone's head and dropping five or six feet is insanely dangerous.  With this tour de force, the film simply ends -- there's no reversion to the cottage and the little kids.  Now, the frame is the war. 

There are many amazing things in this film:  the Cakewalk number features Black female dancers who have little Sambo faces on the backs of the floral bonnets -- the girls dance frontward, showing their real faces, and backward with the minstrel caricatures bobbing and waving.  Lena Horne has her hair styled into a tubular roll that entraps her glittering hat, shaped like a fez from which there depend two huge peacock feathers.  There's a number in which two Black men perform fully corked-up and in Black face -- the entire number consists of one man uttering an sentence which he never completes because interrupted by his interlocutor who, in turn, he interrupts.  This colloquy takes place in front of jalopy that keeps breaking down and gushing smoke and fire all over the stage.  On a paddle-wheeler, a guy performs a song that consists entirely of him shaking his jowls, making his lips wobble, and shuddering as if he's suffering some kind of epileptic seizure.  Fats Waller is ineffably wonderful and strange -- performing "Don't Get Around Much Anymore", he seems to be manically channeling Betty Boop.  Cab Calloway is also completely bizarre -- he writhes around in a feline manner, wearing an oversized surrealistically stylized white zoot suit and a huge floppy brimmed hat with a gold key chain that seems to droop down to his ankles.,  There are racist touches that have to be seen to be believed -- voodoo witchdoctors chasing jungle maidens and the like.  Selena performs with a little Croix de Guerre on her shoulder -- her brother was killed in the Great War and it is his medal.  The film was originally shot in sepia and one would like to see how this looks -- the version I saw on Turner Classic Movies was black-and-white.  In the "Stormy Weather" ballet, the camera dollies through a window beside which Selena is singing -- it's raining outside and we see couples standing on a wet street corner, possibly waiting for a bus, and they shudder in the cold, huddle together and, yet, also perform some kind of unutterably sad shuffling dance. 

Bill Williamson doesn't get the girl.  He's living alone in the dream-cottage he built for her, but she is somewhere else.  The children that we thought were his progeny are just "neighbor kids." And the world is at war again.  "Bojangles" Robinson was 65 when he made this film, although he looks far, far younger.  He died a couple years later.  Like Fred Astaire, he's not a conventionally handsome leading man -- he carriage is military; he walks in fantastically erect manner, a sort of bantam fighter strut that Jimmy Cagney sometimes adopted.  His head is just a skull with taut skin outlining the bones and his eyes are huge and cartoonishly hyper-expressive.  He plays a defeated man in the film and it's all terribly sad.