Product: Stormy Weather [VHS] (1980)
Rating: 4.0
Wonderful music, singing and dancing; not much plot
What a musical treat Stormy Weather is! One of several "race films" produced by the major studios in the early 1940s (this one by 20th Century Fox), Stormy Weather offers a showcase of black entertainers. It features the incomparable Leana Horne, Fats Waller, Cab Calloway, Ada Brown, and Emmet 'Babe' Wallace singing. The dancing is also a treat, with headliner Bill Robinson (Mr. Bojangles), the Nicholas Brothers, and the Katherine Dunham Dance Troupe. My favorite song is actually sung by the uncredited Babe Wallace--his creamy baritone rendition of "African Dance", a song with lyrics by Langston Hughes (!), is offered as a front for Robinson's wonderful dance across the tom-tom drums, but what a front it is. The stairs dance by the Nicholas Brothers is a marvel--Fred Astaire called it the single best dance routine ever captured on film. The plot is quite thin, even in a day when musical films typically had thin plots, but at least by setting Stormy Weather smack in the middle of the entertainment business, it provided ample opportunity for superb music and dancing. Production values are solid. The DVD offers an excellent version of the film, although the DVD commentary loses sight of the magic of the film and its performers with misplaced social commentary. Story Weather offers top flight entertainers in top flight club settings. If you love music and dance, you owe it to yourself to give it a whirl. (Note that while the thumbnail for the cover notes that the film included Eddie 'Rochester' Anderson, it does not; his scenes were left on the cutting room floor. For Anderson along with Ethel Waters and Lena Horne, take a look at the 1943 Cabin in the Sky.)