This is a singing cowboy film from 1936. It stars Gene Autry. You've never heard of him. He plays a stuntman who gets called in to impersonate a movie star at a personal appearance gig after the real guy takes off on vacation. He ends up being way more talented than the original guy, meets a girl, foils a robbery, sings, does trick riding and then permanently replaces the poor bastard whose only crime was not leaving a number where he could be reached during his vacation. The moral of the story: There is always someone better at being you than you.
I love watching people dance. That probably sounds a little weird but fuck it, I don't care. I have watched
So You Think You Can Dance since its first season, I own
Riverdance, and I love ballet movies. From
Center Stage to
Black Swan, I love them. This is not a great movie; the dances were filmed live and look horribly overexposed before editing in little expository scenes with Maurice Chevalier. Roland Petit directs, choreographs, and performs in four excerpts of his Ballet de Paris Company: The Diamond Crusher, A Merry Mourning, Cyrano de Bergerac, and Carmen. It stars some very famous ballerinas including an incredibly young Cyd Charisse. The dancing is great, especially Carmen. Cyrano runs a little long and I thought The Diamond Crusher made no fucking sense whatsoever and was boring. I do tend to think of ballet as serious, high-brow art so A Merry Mourning was a little surprising because it's a comedic piece. But Cyd Charisse really can't go wrong. The woman was just amazingly charismatic. I have a total girl-crush on her.
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