Eleanor Powell in classic form

I confess that I’m not the standard bearer of Eleanor Powell fandom. It’s not that I dislike her. It’s simply that I find her screen presence a little slim, defined largely by an overbig grin dominated by a healthy upper set of choppers and an admirable ability to make herself at home in any situation.

But that’s all beside the point the moment she starts to dance, invariably clad in slacks or pant suits or (for the big show-stoppers) tights and hosiery. You flaunt what you got, and she’s got legs and she makes them move. Long before Gene Kelly made the gymnastic leap from stage to screen, Eleanor Powell was Hollywood’s tap royalty (because Bill “Bojangles” Robinson could simply not be a leading man in the racial caste system of old Hollywood). Her smile still bugs me – it’s not aesthetics, it’s a matter of taste that makes me wince whenever she tosses her back for a wide, closed-eye grin in the middle of a number – but at the same time she makes it all look like fun, and that is infectious.

I mention this because Warner’s new nine-film box set Classic Musicals From the Dream Factory Volume 3 features four Eleanor Powell films, and they are a reminder of just what audiences attended musicals for. Broadway Melody of 1936 (which was, of course, released in 1935) and Broadway Melody of 1938 (1937) were MGM’s answer to Warner Bros.’s Golddigger films, purely formulaic backstage musicals with a revue approach to storytelling. The songs aren’t motivated by story, they are simply time-outs for showcase numbers. And while they lack the sass and spunk and surreal production numbers stage by Busby Berkley on a stage that exists only in his imagination, Powell can dance rings around Ruby Keeler, the chorus girl who rises to stardom by pure spunk. Keeler rarely took her eyes off her feet as she pounded out her dance numbers (she brought new meaning to the term “hoofer”) and had the grace of a factory girl on a night out, which may have been her charm at the height of the depression. Powell played the small town girl with grace and ambition and the talent to back it up, both as singer and dancer. Born to Dance (1936) is just as formulaic in its combination of backstage drama and sailors on leave looking for sweethearts, but slips into the more traditional musical style of wooing and romantic canoodling bursting into song and dance. (For the record, I didn’t rewatch Lady Be Good, 1941, for this review, but it’s a basic showbiz romantic drama with Eleanor Powell dancing around a story centered on songwriters Ann Sothern and Robert Young, and t hen helping them reunite after they divorce.)

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