netwallah Review of Dames

Dames (1934)

Great dance routines, fine character actors, okay songs, bland romantic leads, dim plot

[5/10 · 2 December 2006]

A genre-piece—another movie about putting on a play—and as such it has t be carried by singing and dancing. Actually, mostly by the dancing, because too much of the singing is down by Dick Powell, who has a nice enough, bland voice, but who is mostly unwatchable, because he has beady little eyes and an extraordinarily long upper lip and squirrel-cheeks, and his idea of acting is taking assertively chipper to a sociopathic level. He means to be optimistic, but it comes out solipsistic: he ignores or bulldozes over everybody, smiling his puppet-like grin. Joan Blondell sings, too, and she shouldn't, though her problem is not as serious as Powell's, consisting only in the minor faults of not having a pleasant singing voice and not singing in tune. But she carries on like a trouper anyway. Ruby Keeler dances and occupies the space where a star is supposed to be. So much for the principles; they're nearly disposable. This leaves the rest of the movie for people worth watching. First, there is the sausage tycoon Horace P. Hemingway (Guy Kibbee) and his wife Mathilda (Zasu Pitts), and her eccentric millionaire cousin Ezra Ounce (Hugh Herbert), who is set to give Horace and Mathilda ten million dollars, and who decides to stamp out theatre in New York in the interest of the moral order. Horace has been blackmailed—though innocent—into funding the show, which makes for some amusing complications and some amusing hapless expressions on Kibbee's round pieplate of a face. Everything would end miserably except that the teetotaller Ezra relies on Dr. Silver's Golden Elixir—79% alcohol—to cure him of hiccups and at the opening he means to destroy they all get deliriously and happily inebriated. When he finally has a good time he stops trying to censor everybody else. There is one good song ("I Only Have Eyes for You"), but it goes on too long. Keeler dances a little, and there's one brief episode when her syncopated, rapid-fire, percussive dancing is actually musical. Okay, she's not much of an actor, and she isn't quite as pretty as a lot of film treatments seem to assume, but she really can dance--and it's not just clacking away on the off-beat. When it comes time to put on the show, the supposedly on-stage song-and-dance routines seep into realistic (or cinematic) scenes, which is too bad because the Busby Berkeley arrangements are truly breathtaking and ridiculous and brilliant. The character actors are so good I wouldn't quite recommend skipping everything but the dances, but it wouldn't hurt to fast-forward through the Powell-Keller scenes.