Last night I saw
The Unfinished Dance again after an interval of more than sixty years, thanks to Turner Classic Movies. I find that the films my friends and I loved when we were children are not highly regarded in the modern day, are not produced on DVD, are, in fact, forgotten.
That Lady in Ermine, for example, the movie that first introduced me to the bittersweet joys of sex.
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Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. and Betty Grable in period costume, floating up the castle stairs (literally floating, it was a dream sequence). Betty Grable in a blue velvet cloak with a silk-lined hood trimmed in white fur, returning at last to the Hungarian officer whose heart she had broken. How I wanted that cloak! How I wanted a fur-trimmed hood! Betty Grable, my word, even spell-check has forgotten her, and is underlining her name in red.
The Unfinished Dance, for those of you who weren't impressionable little girls in 1947, was a ballet flick starring Margaret O'Brien, at that time my favorite movie star. She got top billing. Cyd Charisse played the ballerina she worshipped, and Karin Booth (who?) was the classy dancer whose career little Margaret O'Brien ruined when she pulled the lever to open the trap door during
Swan Lake, causing her idol's rival to fall and injure her spine in some unspecified way. Her injuries didn't keep her from walking, or indeed from dancing beautifully for about a minute and a half, after which she would collapse attractively on the stage in a half-swoon. She was finished as a dancer, though. Cyd Charisse's character triumphantly took all her parts.
Watching that movie again, it was clear to me why we loved it, and why it inspired me to give up tap and take up ballet dancing, even though I was clumsy and the toe shoes made my feet hurt. It was full of delectable little girls, just like us except that they could dance on point. Elinor Donahue was in it. Remember her? The teenager in
Father Knows Best? She played Margaret O'Brien's best friend, dancing beautifully, completely charming. We wanted to be her. We wanted to be Margaret O'Brien. We wanted to have those girls for friends. We went home and whined at our mothers until we all got toe shoes.
With the eye of a grownup, and many years of life experience and moviegoing experience under my belt, I see this flick quite differently. I compare it to other ballet flicks, better ones,
The Red Shoes,
Billy Elliot. First of all there seem to be no male dancers in
The Unfinished Dance, only women and little girls. All the men are stock characters, the stagehands, the publicity agent, the impresario, even Danny Thomas, the eccentric foreign almost-uncle who takes care of the orphaned Margaret O'Brien. Nowadays some of us would view their relationship with deep suspicion, I'm sorry to say. But in the old days everything was brighter.
Including Miss Booth's lipstick. All the makeup in that movie was slathered on with a trowel. We see Karin Booth lying on her fainting couch, half dead, and you could read a newspaper by the gleam of her cherry-red lip gloss. Curiously, her hair was red in some scenes and brown in others. Ah, Technicolor.
IMDB says that
The Unfinished Dance has been available as a Warner Home Video since 2011. Who knew? Maybe I should get it! But, no. Some movies you only want to see once every five or six decades.
© 2013
Kate Gallison
The Unfinished Dance, for those of you who weren't impressionable little girls in 1947, was a ballet flick starring Margaret O'Brien, at that time my favorite movie star. She got top billing. Cyd Charisse played the ballerina she worshipped, and Karin Booth (who?) was the classy dancer whose career little Margaret O'Brien ruined when she pulled the lever to open the trap door during Swan Lake, causing her idol's rival to fall and injure her spine in some unspecified way. Her injuries didn't keep her from walking, or indeed from dancing beautifully for about a minute and a half, after which she would collapse attractively on the stage in a half-swoon. She was finished as a dancer, though. Cyd Charisse's character triumphantly took all her parts.
Watching that movie again, it was clear to me why we loved it, and why it inspired me to give up tap and take up ballet dancing, even though I was clumsy and the toe shoes made my feet hurt. It was full of delectable little girls, just like us except that they could dance on point. Elinor Donahue was in it. Remember her? The teenager in Father Knows Best? She played Margaret O'Brien's best friend, dancing beautifully, completely charming. We wanted to be her. We wanted to be Margaret O'Brien. We wanted to have those girls for friends. We went home and whined at our mothers until we all got toe shoes.
My mother had some notion that Margaret O'Brien was a spoiled brat so I didn't see many of her movies. Mom, a keen reader of Photoplay and other movie magazines, somehow had the idea that Margaret had prevented her mother from remarrying because she wanted all her mother's attention. I think I saw her only in "Little Women" because my mother adored Elizabeth Taylor. Oh, and Margaret O'Brien dies (she plays Beth) and Liz gets more screen time.
ReplyDeleteI'm sorry spell check has forgotten Betty Grable, but I do find that I have to explain more and more to younger people. If one more person says to me, "Oh, I wouldn't know that. I wasn't born then" I may have to launch into my "Nobody knows anything anymore " screed.
Steph
I heard that rumor too. What Margaret O'Brien did best on the screen was to cry and weep, and we heard that she cried and wept at her mother's wedding until they called it off. My mother— both my parents—thought Margaret O'Brien's character in Meet me In St. Louis was an awful brat because she made such a scene when her father was going to move the family to another city that he called off the move. If I'd seen that movie when it first came out it would have radicalized me. I had no idea a child could have so much power in family decisions. I certainly never had that kind of power. If that were us, all I got out of knocking down the snowmen and bawling about having to move would have been "something to cry about." For you young folks, that means I would have got hit.
ReplyDeleteOh, that sounds SO familiar.
ReplyDeleteSteph
We were brutalized. Right? Brutalized. And on top of that we had to move all the time.
ReplyDeleteMy earliest memory in this line was Shirley Temple. My mother decided to make my naturally curls into ST's, and oh did the kids at school make fun of those curls!! The next memory was being told I cd not go to GWTW, as it had cuss words! Today, I think those were some of the greatest lines in the history of the world --- Frankly, my, dear, I don't give a damn... tjs
ReplyDeleteI once said to my father, "Well, the only reason I have to move is because you have the money." He said, "That's a pretty good reason, right?"
ReplyDeleteSteph