Until a monster dancer joins her on stage — Jack Cole.

Choreographers, pay attention @ 1:43. Ladies and gentlemen, that is the way to make an entrance — on your knees!

Do you notice that Cole never fully stands up? See how he hugs the ground? Modern dance roots.  Layer on that the jitterbug moves he learned from the best — by dancing with ladies like Marie Bryant at Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom.

You can see that Hayworth enjoys being partnered by him.

The men in the group are trained in Cole technique, the women not. That would come later.

Tonight and Every Night is a very fun, watchable movie, full of dance. The marvelous Marc Platt, the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo guy, has a speaking role in it, and he dances as well. 

What a coincidence, Jerry Robbins’s sailor ballet “Fancy Free,” which led to On the Town (1949) and made possible all kinds of Americanisms in classical ballet, dates from 1944. Who imitated whom? I personally think of Cole as a greater innovator than Robbins, who was known for borrowing.  But lacking conclusive evidence, let’s just say that both dances were conceived during the War, when sailors were in the zeitgeist.

Like this? Read more:

• Rita Hayworth’s gown by John Singer Sargent
• Jack Cole invites you to a ball
• Jerome Robbins, ballet drill sargent

The silken jazz dancer, Marie Bryant (1919-1978), seen here jiving with the great Harold Nicholas, was, for a time, rehearsal assistant to Jack Cole. That’s interesting. Cole’s performance group was all white. It wouldn’t be otherwise. But he clearly relied on Bryant for special tasks. Asked what she did for Jack Cole, Bryant replied,  “I teach Betty Grable to shake her buns.”

I have long wondered what transformed Grable from a schmaltzy-waltzer into the bootie-shaking hottie of “No Talent Joe.” I naturally credited Cole. Now I think differently. Enter Marie Bryant.

_{Thank you, Wandering & Pondering for posting on Marie Bryant.}

“The designer Jean Louis, supposedly inspired by John Singer Sargent‘s famous portrait of the décolleté Madame X, created for Miss Hayworth a fetishistic black satin strapless gown, with elbow-length gloves, and the dance director Jack Cole devised the strip-tease routine in which she flung those gloves to her audience.

The director, Vidor, expected the filming of “Put the Blame on Mame” would be difficult, but he was pleasantly surprised the moment Miss Hayworth appeared. “She sauntered on the stage holding her head high, in that magnificent way she does,” he said, “stepping long like a sleek young tiger cut, and the whistles that sounded who have shamed a canary’s convention. She enjoyed very second of it. Then she did that elaborate difficult ‘Mame’ number in two takes.”"

Blurb taken from: City of Nets, A Portrait of Hollywood in the 1940s, by Otto Friedrich

Enjoy!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=AkDimkiTMDA

Not primarily an MGM man (Kismet” twice: 1944, 1955, Les Girls 1957, Designing Woman 1957; still he was affiliated more with Columbia and Fox), Cole prevailed nonetheless in influencing the production’s design. The  evidence is the glowing pink light bathing the scene at 2:55. That’s Jack Cole. The guy saw dance in colors. He would ramp up that pink 100 degrees on his next assignment.

Dance detectives will note that Cole marched, er, waltzed across town, from Culver City to Pico Blvd, and created “Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend” at Fox in 1953. Smart dance maker, he built upon components (waltzing, tour jeté-ing women) from “The Merry Widow,” contemporizing them and adding Marilyn Monroe’s combustible va-va voom. Result: this time, it all clicked, he created a timeless masterpiece.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_aqOTVKebY

_{Thank you Larry Billman, for the MGM-ania.}

Like this? Read more:

• Balanchine invites you to a ball
• The latest from Leo the Lion
• Jack & Marilyn. No not Jack Kennedy, Jack Cole.
• Our entire Jack Cole thread here.
• Jack Cole Made Marilyn Move (Los Angeles Times)

Destinations: Key West and Cozumel.

Getting our letters of transit in order is a huge challenge — but unlike Claude Rains, we do not have the proprietor of Rick’s Café Americain pointing a gun at our belly.

Among the other correspondents on board the S.S. TCM (otherwise known as the Celebrity Millennium), film bio-guru, Scott Eyman and his Palm Beach Post colleague, Lynn Kalber.

TCM has programmed great on-board screenings, including a special theme, a focus on “Hitchcock Blondes,” with special appearances by Eva Marie Saint for “North by Northwest” and Tippi Hedren for “The Birds.”

Ernest Borgnine will be present for discussion after screening “The Poseidon Adventure.”

Beyond the actors, film director Norman Jewison will visit with us concurrent to a double-bill of The Thomas Crown Affair and In the Heat of the Night. That’s my personal favorite. Here is the events schedule, including screenings.

♣      ♣     ♣

I’m very pleased, for Jack Cole‘s sake, that the roster also includes two films associated with the great film choreographer. 

• Moon Over Miami,– Cole’s first Hollywood gig. (The Jack Cole Dancers appearance hit the cutting room floor, but the gig put Cole in front of a movie camera for the first time.)
• Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Howard Hawks’s comic masterpiece, which would be nine million percent less fabulous sans Jack Cole’s brilliant choreography for Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe.

And, guess what dance people? The TCM program for the event mentions Jack Cole in both the film descriptions!!!

TCM hosts, Robert Osborne, just surfacing after a long work hiatus, and Ben Mankiewicz, will also be also on board.

Wish us happy sailing~!

_{Thank you, Casablanca expert Michael Schlesinger.}

The seamstresses — part of Ye Olde Hollywoode.

_{Quel photo! Thank you, curcumperficio.net}

[click on image for better view]

The Nixon Theatre was the top game in town — the place where circa 1971 I saw naked people writhe on stage in “Hair.” Not surprisingly, the hard working Jack Cole once pounded its floorboards, playing a Hungarian gypsy in “Venus in Silk” in 1935.

I’m guessing that this operetta, a precursor to American musical theater, was a schmaltzy little nostalgia for the good ‘ole Austro-Hungarian empire …

There’s Jack, as Raki the gypsy, listed at the bottom of the roster. Well cast. To put it mildly, Cole, who picked up the habit from his time with Ruth St. Denis, was an early dance “internationalist.”

The name of Cole’s nightclub partner, Alice Dudley, whom he met in the Humphrey-Weidman troupe, appears right above his. Dancers? Are you getting this? Jack Cole and Alice Dudley danced in 1) modern dance, 2) night club and on 3) Broadway stage. There were no categories… they did it all!

The Internet auctioneer calls “Venus” a “rare flop” reflecting that the show opened in Pittsburgh on  October 1, 1935 as an out-of-town tryout and closed the following week in Washington, D.C., failing to arrive on Broadway.

The operetta had only had its debut in Zurich in 1932 — tough times in Europe for itsJewish composer Robert Stoltz. A timeline of Stoltz’s amazing career here. I remember my Hungarian boyfriend complaining about the  heavy diet of saccharine operettas he grew up on in Budapest. This must be the stuff he dreaded.

I do love how “Venus in Silk” is called, on the program, a “gay musical.” I bet it was.

Like this? Read more:

• Nijinsky danced in Pittsburgh
• Say a dance prayer for Gene Kelly in Pittsburgh
• Choreographer Kyle Abraham remembers Pittsburgh radio station (Los Angeles Times)

Cafe Life in New York

Jack Cole and His Dancers Featured in the Rainbow Room’s New Show

(by)  Malcolm Johnson

The New York Sun, Saturday, May 18, 1942: The Rainbow Room’s new show, introduced this week, is a gay diversion highlighted by the colorful performance of Jack Cole and his Dancers.

In fact there is probably more down-to-earth light entertainment in this show than in any that the Rainbow Room has offered in quite a spell. It seems just right for these warm spring nights, when most people probably don’t want to be bothered (we don’t, at any rate) with a show that is too long or too heavy.

In addition to Cole and his dancers the Rockefeller Center club is offering the singing of Adrienne, in a return engagement, a clever and amusing dog act, and the Terry Sisters and their rumba band.

No stranger to the Rainbow Room, having appeared there on several occasions during the last few seasons, Jack Cole an his troupe do a series of dances shrewdly contrived to appeal to popular taste, yet without sacrificing artistic integrity. There is sharp satire and good humor in most of their numbers. this is especially true of one called “The Dance of the Solid Sender,” in which Cole appears as a sad-faced jive man of the Harlem school and is assisted by Florence Lessing and four other young women in jitterbug costumes.

The group also present Cole’s now familiar East Indian dance patterns and he and Miss Lessing are seen in a fast and colorful native Latin dance. The costumes used by the company are all colorful and particularly well suited to the dances presented.

Like this? Read more:

• Ronni Chasen’s restaurant renaming
• arts·meme Jack Cole thread here. If you use our Jack Cole material or ideas, consider crediting us. Thank you.

At the Bowl, the Los Angeles Philharmonic will play Bernstein’s electrifying orchestral score while the newly re-mastered film is shown in high definition on the Bowl’s big screen, original vocals and dialog intact. 

Chakiris now channels his significant creative energy into The George Chakiris Collections, several elegant lines of artful silver jewelry. He modestly displays his wares and cruises memory lane in the video:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOjHXqDI4XU

West Side Story night | The Hollywood Bowl | Friday, July 8

Like this? Read more:

• Movie Musical Talk w/George Chakiris, artsmeme
• TCM Fest Celebrates Dance in Film, Los Angeles Times
• Jack Cole & Marilyn Monroe reunite at Jacob’s Pillow, youtube

Indeed d’Amboise’s name, well-known considering he’s “just” a dancer, buzzed around the Festival screening room when the credit scrolled at the end of “Seven Brides”: “Jacques d’Amboise, courtesy of New York City Ballet.”

D’Amboise is very young in the film, and they keep him quiet, possibly to mum up his huge Bronx accent. He’s surrounded by dance giants, among them Marc Platt and Tommy Rall, the latter who Academy of Dance on Film founder, Larry Billman, calls, “the best dancer — ever.”

At his book talk, D’Amboise tells a funny story about waiting between takes on the set, and Rall stands up and with no warmup or preparation whatsoever, rips off multiple triple tours en l’air. D’Amboise, half laughing, admits that to this day, he has no clue why Rall did it. Boredom, d’Amboise conjectures. Dancers spend gobs of time sitting around, waiting, when making movies.

In “Seven Brides,” it’s the tall lanky Jack Cole dancer, Matt Mattox, who captures my eye. What a dancer. He has that hard-core Jack Cole iron gut. He’s still around, in France. A beautiful dancer who went on to choreograph and be a seminal jazz-dance teacher.

SEVEN BRIDES FOR SEVEN BROTHERS

MGM, 1954, Color, 102 minutes

Produced by: Jack Cummings
Directed by: Stanley Donen
Assistant Director: Ridgeway Callow
Screen Play by: Albert Hackett & Frances Goodrich and Dorothy Kingsley
Musical Direction: Adolph Deutsch
Musical Supervision: Saul Chaplin
Lyrics by: Johnny Mercer
Music by: Gene DePaul
Orchestrations: Alexander Courage, Conrad Salinger and Leo Arnaud
Dances and Musical Numbers Staged by: Michael Kidd
Set Decorations: Edwin B. Willis, Hugh Hunt
Costumes Designed by: Walter Plunkett

Filmed in CinemaScope, Color by Ansco

Awards:
Academy Award for Best Score, Musical
Academy Award Nominations for Best Picture, Best Screenplay , Best Color Cinematography and Best Film Editing

Cast:
Howard Keel (Adam Pontipee),
Jane Powell (Milly),
Jeff Richards (Benjamin Pontipee),
Russ Tamblyn (Gideon Pontipee),
Nancy Kilgas (Alice),
Tommy Rall (Frank Pontipee),
Betty Carr (Sarah),
Marc Platt (Daniel Pontipee),
Virginia Gibson (Liza),
Matt Mattox (Caleb Pontipee),
Jacques d’Amboise (Ephraim Pontipee)