Eleanor Powell – Hula
An evening pause: From Honolulu (1939). What I like about this is that everyone involved has no worries about offending anyone. They are free to take the native cultural music of Hawaii and embellish it as the whim takes them. They were free (to repeat that forgotten word) to be as creative as they like. The result is a pretty hot dance number.
Hat tip Edward Thelen.
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What superb talent, production … no lasers, CGI, etc.
Aren’t we supposed to be concerned about Mylie Cyrus’s “twerking” and Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction” and Rianna and Beyoncé and so on and how this sort of sexualized self-display is destroying Our National Moral Fiber?
More seriously … Nice cut, nice dancing, nice music. I’d really love to see this again (and again and again) on a big screen at a local movie theatre. And something that strikes me is NOT the political incorrectness of a hula dance in a movie, but that there was a fairly high degree of sophistication in the music and choreography, which clearly would have been enjoyed by some reasonably large portion of the audience watching that film. I.e., Hollywood wasn’t filled with philistine jerks in the 1940’s, and the people who enjoyed those films weren’t all rednecks and rubes.
So. Thanks for the memories. And for the reflections they’ve inspired.