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of 1945"  |
It was the final film to star
of TheColumnists.com
Every now and then I have to take notice of the fact that the Internet has enriched the lives of film buffs like me, helping us find beloved movies that we want to see at least one more time before we shuffle off this mortal coil.
My latest example is "Sensations of 1945," an independent film released by United Artists in 1944, which I think I saw as a kid in a movie theater, but surely saw in the early 1950s when it was one of the first old movies to show up on TV late shows.
I'm not sure it blew me away as a kid because I was much more interested in war movies and westerns than I was in B-movie musicals, which is probably where "Sensations of 1945" has been categorized for the past 60-plus years. But images from that movie stuck in my mind and the more I looked into it, the greater hunger I had to see it again.
Sadly, though, "Sensations of 1945" hasn't been in commercial home video release in stores for a long, long time.--if ever. Nobody was reviving it on TV or in repertory theaters either. But then it popped up the other day as an offering of The Nostalgia Family online video store, which still sells VHS tapes of old films, but also makes them available in "no frills" DVD copies that come in simple plastic disc covers that snap shut so you can store them in file boxes.
Nostalgia Family is a good, reliable online source for old films and my copy of "Sensations of 1945" arrived in good condition with no missing segments that I could identify. The cost: Nothing. That's because they had a sale going where if you bought so many films at one price, you got a free one from the same price list. Most of the films cost about $15 per DVD title and they make your copy for you "on demand" from their video masters.
This time I was delighted to discover "Sensations of 1945" was well worth waiting for all those years and I could understand why certain images lingered in my mind for more than half a century.
First, this was the last film to star the great Eleanor Powell, in my opinion the greatest female tap dancer of all time. If you question that opinion, I refer you to one of the greatest dance sequences in movie history--Eleanor Powell and Fred Astaire doing Cole Porter's "Begin the Beguine" in "Broadway Melody of 1940." She is the only partner who ever came close to blowing Astaire off the screen by matching him tap for tap and then raising the bar on him to get him to really reach for something beyond his usual perfection.
Her MGM star days were finished by the mid 1940s and Powell was ready to settle down for marriage with actor Glenn Ford and call it a day for her career. As it turned out, the marriage didn't last and she came back to perform as a "guest" star in Esther Williams' "Duchess of Idaho" in 1950. She kept busy doing stage dancing well into her 60s. But before she gave up having her name above the title in movies, she did "Sensations of 1945," playing a dancer who decided to publicize herself in sensationally exploitive ways in order to draw ever bigger crowds.
The big dance number she does in this film is a famous one: Powell dresses like a sexy human pinball and taps her way through a giant pinball machine set, lighting up the displays with clever kicks in between tapping flurries. Powell was a pretty girl with awesomely-shapely legs and I could watch her bounce her way around that pinball machine for hours on end, if it only ran that long.
"Sensations of 1945" also was the final film to feature the great comic W.C. Fields. He does an old-fashioned burlesque-style skit in the film, which isn't among the funniest things he ever did, but it does show that he still was able to be reasonably nimble and glib, even though his booze-soaked liver must have been rebelling every step of the way.
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screen role, does a skit in "Sensations of 1945." |
Powell's romantic interest in the film is actor Dennis O'Keefe, always one of my favorites, though he's somewhat forgotten today. He plays the publicist she's trying to show up. He's naturally a bit more conservative than Powell, who at one point even stages a fake assassination attempt on herself, but he gains respect for her promotional derring-do as they go along.
One of her notions is to bring back an old vaudeville headliner, played by that great British character-actor C. Aubrey Smith, to host a reunion of early 20th century stars as performers. That gives us the chance to see the legendary Sophie Tucker, "last of the red hot mamas," doing a couple of her classic numbers. Tucker was having a big year in 1944. She also rocked movie theaters that year doing a big number in Universal's all-star "Follow the Boys" and went on to an enormous revival of her stardom with lots of TV performances on Ed Sullivan's "Toast of the Town" and other venues in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Still another big attraction of "Sensations of 1945" is the appearance of Woody Herman with his great jazz band of the 1940s. Herman was right up there with Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw among clarinet players and his numbers in "Sensations" are among his best ever on film. If you look sharp, too, you'll see the immortal guitarist Les Paul with his trio, as he was before the coming of Mary Ford and the real glory years on the Hit Parade.
And yet another great performer who's shoe-horned into the movie is Cab Calloway, the great African-American bandleader, singer and all-around wild man. Calloway was still a reasonably young man in 1944 (about 37) and his exuberance on screen was infectious. We should treasure all the early footage of that great entertainer and there's a good deal of it in "Sensations."
I love the movie for another reason, too: It's an anomaly among the directing jobs done by Andrew L. Stone, whose career behind the camera began in silent pictures, but included the noir classic "The Night Holds Terror" (1956) with John Cassavetes and Vince Edwards; the stylish mystery "A Blueprint for Murder" (1953) with Joseph Cotten; that amazing all-black musical classic "Stormy Weather" (1943) with Lena Horne, Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, good old Cab Calloway and The Nicholas Brothers; "Julie" (1956), the Doris Day non-musical thriller; the spectacular 1960 "The Last Voyage" with Robert Stack, in which Stone sank a real ocean liner as a special effect, and, his final film, the elaborate remake of "The Great Waltz" (1972) about the Strauss family with opera star Mary Costa playing a romantic lead.
Though "Sensations of 1945" is kind of a scramble of a story--Stone was one of the writers, too--it has lots of magic moments, some fnnny dialogue and that dazzling footwork by Eleanor Powell. I felt so rewarded by finally tracking down a copy of this film that I highly recommend every film buff go on similar searches for the old films they want to see just one more time.
If you're interested, you can find "Sensations of 1945" at: www.nostalgiafamilyvideo.com
©2010 by Ron Miller.
This column first posted Aug. 2, 2010.
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