What would one of Twentieth Century Fox’s flimsy backstage Betty Grable musicals be like with a completely African-American cast? We get the answer with Andrew L. Stone’s Stormy Weather. As with Grable’s vehicles, the movie with its mega-thin plot is merely an excuse to string together a series of musical numbers with the leading talent of the era, and what musical numbers they are! With Lena Horne leading the way (and doing more versatile performing here than she was ever allowed during most of her MGM years), Stormy Weather holds up well today as superlative entertainment.
Studio: Fox
Distributed By: Twilight Time
Video Resolution and Encode: 1080P/AVC
Aspect Ratio: 1.37:1
Audio: English 1.0 DTS-HDMA (Mono)
Subtitles: English SDH
Rating: Not Rated
Run Time: 1 Hr. 18 Min.
Package Includes: Blu-ray
keep caseDisc Type: BD50 (dual layer)
Region: All
Release Date: 02/10/2015
MSRP: $29.95
The Production Rating: 4/5
The Frederick Jackson-Ted Koehler screenplay is the same kind of fluff plot that Betty Grable or Alice Faye would have typically been plopped into: on again-off again romantic entanglements and love triangles surrounded by more than a dozen musical numbers. Though some of the amazing talent on display remained headliners for many decades and are thus easy to recognize today (Cab Calloway, Fats Waller, the Nicholas Brothers), others like Ada Brown who does a scrumptious blues version of “That Ain’t Right” and Mae E. Johnson who delights with “I Lost My Sugar in Salt Lake City” aren’t nearly as well known and certainly deserve to be. The focus, of course, is on the two main stars: Lena Horne and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. Horne burns up the screen with a number of solo moments: the legendary title song, of course, but also “There’s No Two Ways About Love” (which bookends the movie), and “Diga, Diga, Doo” with Horne exquisitely outfitted for a jungle cat number while sharing “The Cakewalk” and “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love” with Bill Robinson.
Newcomers to the movie will be surprised to see Lena Horne doing a fair amount of dancing in a couple of production numbers (she almost always was a stationary singer in her MGM movies and rarely had any dance steps to perform), and with her gorgeous face and figure, she for the first time proves herself to be a true triple threat artist to rank right alongside Faye and Grable in the talent department (more’s the pity that Cabin the Sky was the only other film musical which gave her a real chance at virtuoso performing, and she’s decidedly playing second fiddle to Ethel Waters in that). As for Robinson, he gets at least three solo tap and soft shoe routines where his famous stairstep tapping and easygoing movements endear him instantly to audiences (and his scene-stealing sequence during Wallace’s “Tom Tom” routine might have been even more impressive with more fluid camerawork). Cab Calloway in all of his zoot suited glory makes his own solid impressions with “Geechy Joe” and “Jumpin’ Jive,” the latter also featuring the astounding acrobatic tapping and leaping by the Nicholas Brothers. Sadly, Dooley Wilson, the actor who memorialized “As Time Goes By” in Casablanca, doesn‘t get to sing a single note in the film while playing Bill’s best friend Gabe Tucker.
Video Rating: 5/5 3D Rating: NA
Audio Rating: 4.5/5
Special Features Rating: 2.5/5
Isolated Score Track: presented in DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 stereo.
Six-Page Booklet: offers a rich selection of black and white stills, original poster art on the back cover, and film historian Julie Kirgo’s enthusiastic overview of the film.
Overall Rating: 4/5
Reviewed By: Matt Hough
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