Director:
David Burton
Year: 1932
Rating: 5.0
It's 10 cents a dance and lonely men buy their
tickets to a few minutes of human contact - of a close dance, a snuggle,
a furtive kiss perhaps in a fancy dance hall where the girls line up hoping
to find a big spender and the men someone who might be available at the end
of the night. As soon as the girl gets the ticket their meter goes on and
there is always another to hail if the ride goes nowhere. Taxi Dancers. It
is the Depression and 10 cents a dance is the only way a lot of women can
pay the rent. This is a pre-code film but I don't think there was much here
that would have been censored only a few years later. A lot is often made
of the pre-code era but the vast majority of films censored themselves to
the taste of the public. It is also Prohibition of course and the customers
and girls have to settle for floats and soft drinks. Seeing George Raft order
a root beer feels all wrong.
Raft is actually billed sixth in the film - he had primarily only made uncredited
appearances in a handful of films before this one but here he is pure Raft
- a wise guy with a gat in his pocket and a tough supply of dialogue and
Raft has all the mannerisms down that were to make him a star beginning with
his next film in Scarface. The stars in this one are Miriam Hopkins as a
Taxi Dancer who has a reputation as an easy ride, Jackie Oakie as the band
leader, William Collier Jr as the saxophone player in love with Miriam and
the wonderful Eugene Pallette as a customer who hooks up with a Russian Taxi
Dancer.
It nearly all takes place in the club and we get a rendition of St Louis
Blues a few times - a request from Raft to have Hopkins sing it (clearly
not her voice and I have learned dubbed by Adelaide Hall, a black jazz and
blues singer). He has a thing for her but she has decided to go straight
and marry the sax player who is an innocent kid who doesn't know better.
Oakie tries to set him straight - men don't marry that kid of woman but you
can't argue with love - no one ever has won that argument. Dramas and murder
take place and a bit of heartbreak too - real life intrudes in the fantasy
of willing women too often. It only runs about 70 minutes but Paramount gives
it solid talent from the script writer Herman J. Mankiewicz (Citizen Kane)
adapting it from a Broadway play to a solid cast. The film today feels more
like a curiosity than anything really - life during the hard economic times
- it doesn't have much of a plot and dawdles along for too long and sort
of wastes the comic genius of Pallette. Hopkins I admit doesn't do much for
me.
Hopkins had jumped from theater to film only a few years previously - after
the switch to sound actors with theater experience were in great demand -
and was on her way up with her role in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and The Smiling
Lieutenant directed by Lubitsch but it was two films that were soon to follow
- Trouble in Paradise and Design for Living - that were to make her a star.
But after turning down the main role in It Happened One Night and not getting
the role of Scarlett in Gone with the Wind, her appearances in films became
fairly sparse.
