Being a big fan I guess I'm the only one who knows this. Betty Grable made her first screen appearance in this movie. She's one of the dancers. Her mother lied about her age. She was 14 but said she was 16. Eventually she was let go but when she was old enough she played many bit parts through the '30s. By 1939 she left a Broadway play to go to 20th century fox to replace Alice Faye in Down Argentine Way 1940. The rest is history. She became the top female box office draw from the early '40s to the early '50s. MM came in and took over as the Fox blond. Grable made a few more movies and left to pursue television and Vegas. My favorite movie blond.
What a shame they made sexual merchandise out of her as a child. She never had children either, died pretty young of cancer. Sad life, missed out on the real point.
they do. there is. type in modern swing on your RU-vid search. might just shock you to see how huge of a thing this is now, from contest to dance halls. everything moves in circles. what was will be again and again.
Ninety five years ago. I'd like to see a listing of all the women who danced for this, and I wonder how their lives went. I hope they had long, fulfilling, and happy lives.
You can clearly see how, a few years later, Busby Berkeley really tightened up the dancers into far sharper synchronized movements for mass dance scenes.
Ann Miller said he was merciless. She had a injury to her foot that bled and he still made her dance. I've seen all of Ann Miller' RU-vid interviews on RU-vid. She mentions that in a couple of them.
I have seen this video several times, and I never get tired of watching it, those girls from that time were very beautiful, also with that formidable talent, it is very pleasant to see them
Anne Pennington, a great Ziegfeld star I never thought I'd see dance. Thanks to RU-vid, no problem! She ended up dying, not exactly well off, as her film career never took off, and her dance roles diminished as she aged. It was said she "became a familiar but unfortunate presence in the lobby of the Times Square Hotel and at the Horn & Hardart automat, often seen sitting alone with a cup of coffee." When she died at 77 the Actors Fund and Benevolent Guild paid for her funeral and plot. Sigh!
I saw this and thought back to the late 1960s and how adults at the time were losing their minds over OUR dancing! Lol Wish we could have showed them this!
11yrs after WW1 and about 17yrs after the Titanic went down - times when flashing an ankle was seen as obscene or extremely daring! Its amazing how social norms can change so quickly that women with performing bare legs and wearing knee high skirts in public could be celebrated so soon after - on the dance and fashion fronts we have a lot to thank the ladies of the era for!
IF you know...the Black Bottom Dance...it's a Fertility Dance Referring to the Delta Soil. It got reworked into the Charleston Drag, and you can hear part of the Melody.
Oh, they knew. I pointed it out to my mother when I was a young teen and she was watching an oldie like this on TV one afternoon. I was informed that "they're professional performers and dancers in a Movie. YOU are not! So you'd better Not be dancing like this in public!". Yikes. Uh, ok. Nope I sure don't mom.
The way the dancers were "Thumping that Stage , in Unison ,I'm surprised it didn't Collapse ...kinda lije the Danger Posed by people doing " The WAVE" on more modern Stadiums ...👯🍾💃😎🎠🏟️🪬
It's interesting, isn't it that back then NO ONE wanted to have breasts, the smaller they were the better - nowadays, all the would-be's and wanna-be's spend their money on getting bigger and ever bigger ones! This was gorgeous, I loved it, thanks!
Never liked Over- Sized Boobs much , myself ...Shape is the Important thing !! Carmen Electra is a perfect Example ...before the boob job , She Was Exquisite !!!
The ancients did I remarkable job of finding many wimmen that all had near the exact same measurements and proportions, ougta be some kinda award for that alone!
My stepfather had a saying he used to share when someone was clumsy, "snakehips went for a touchdown"... still.not sure what he meant. These dancers were phenomenal.
@@larrygrant-hy8sk And in the '30s, in my hometown, one could see a movie at the Tyler St. theater for a dime, which included a weekly give away of a piece of dinnerware at the Saturday matinees.
@@hugejohnson5011 i remember going to the Tennessee theater in Knoxville, TN. On Saturdays, where there was a matinee of serials, live performers, cartoons, and prizes to be had. Those were great days to grow up in.
Ann Pennington had 15 years behind her of Ziegfield Follies, countless Broadway shows and went on unfeatured into the 30's musicals. She was only 4'10" tall and wore a size 1 1/2 shoe. I imagine the rest of the chorus was sized down to as well.
Wow, I remember hearing that people used to be a lot shorter, but I'm not sure why. Looking at her compared to all the other ladies, they don't seem too much taller than her.
@@VinnieBoombatz374 Old enough to have come across a copy of a book celebrating the original Vanity Fair magazine that included a piece that asked several celebrities to describe their ideal woman, among them, Ziegfield, who described the most desirable attributes for his showgirls.
@@balok63a40 OK, well with all due respect, you don't actually remember anything. You read it in a book. Which is cool, but don't misrepresent yourself. I thought you were at least 100.
It's called "snake hips" for a reason. Those are 2 cobras facing each other and the rest of their bodies are winding up over the stage. You can see it best at the end.
This was made in the innocence days of 1929 the year my parents were born …to hear them talk about it…they passed long before RU-vid was around to show there 1920’s were truly roaring 😊! Have a great day!
It started in 1889 with dance troupe the Tiller Girls in Manchester,England and was originally called ‘fancy dancing’/‘precision dancing’ with girls dancing in line and also with linked arms or geometric shapes!
Correct, and the Tiller Girls were adapting Paris and Berlin music hall styles ....and those go back to Opera Buffo and that was parody of real opera ballet and that was.... Often people stop at a point and don't mention this is a copy of something...but the thing copied was itself copied or inspired... I wonder if cave girls did chorus line numbers.
This was the very early days of talkies. It must have been a thrill in the theater in 1929. You didn't have to read dialog cards, made the action flow that much better. Happy Days was the first film shown in widescreen in the world. It used Fox' 70mm "Grandeur" process. Very cool.
Agreed! I’ve never seen such stiff snake hips 😂 But, they are a joy to watch and it looks like a lot of fun! I’m impressed by their tap skills, strong legs, and fast feet. Nowadays dancers have to train rigorously from three or four years old if they want to dance as a job, and even then, very few are technically proficient enough for the standards that whoever it is at the top decides upon. I’d rather have people who are good at what they do but also keep the joy and have time to enjoy life, like I hope was the case for these folks ☺️
My personal hip-shaking comparison is in the frame of reference of belly dancers. I’m not feeling critical at all, just remarking on the style of the physical movement. They have their own style and did a great job.
@user-cc8ht3im4h it still was 30 years later. They wouldn't televise Elvis Presley below the waist. I am no prude,but these days I think we have gone to the other extreme. Just look at the antcs of Sam Smith for 1 example of art becoming debauchery.
My guess, in just 10 years time, since when women wore long dresses and covered everything up, that showing all that leg, midriff, and pasties (!) was such a cultural shift...even the name "Snake Hips". I can't imagine this was "wholesome family viewing" for that era. Even "chewing gum" was considered declasse.
The long skits came after WW11 in the fifties. Woman told me in the 40’s they were encouraged to wear shorter clothing to boost morale of the deployed soldiers. They told me this themselves. Also, these performers mostly came from Vaudeville and stage. Anne Pennington herself was a “Ziegfeld Follies” girl since 1913 at about 20 yrs.
@@thurayya8905 no actually mid calf to top of ankles….. unless you were a flapper in the mid 20s and then it was knee length and a loose fitting flapper dress.
Yes, pretty remarkable, and a cementer noted it was released just before the stock market crash. One can see every kind of dancing here-did I detect a moon walk of sorts, and that funny leg hip hop thing? So well done! Thanks for posting.
Inadvertent social documentation. By appealing to popular tastes of the time this performance expresses for us 100 years later the attitudes of the time that were considered cool and clever.
What a treasure, it’s before much censorship as well. It looks like Anne is wearing pretty elaborate pasties! Low resolution so really hard to make them out. Risqué for sure. Reminds me of the Broadway Melody
1929: Definitely pre-Breen Office material. Good dancing from the girls and Ann Pennington. Difficult to hide mikes back then and scenes were shot by cameras in sound-deadening boxes; the cameras made so much noise.
Blame the nitrate-based film used at the time. As they aged, the masters of nitrate film turned to dust in the cans they were stored in, and in some cases, would spontaneously combust, causing movie studio fires that destroyed and damaged other stored film cans nearby. There are silent and early sound films that are considered "lost" because of this. They're still finding copies of films thought to be lost, stored in theaters and private homes all over the world. We're lucky to have as many of these incomplete and heavily edited film clips from that era as we do. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_base#Nitrate
@@flamingvans1135 The edits in this number are intentional cuts, not nitrate deterioration. You're absolutely right about how many films have been lost because of this self-destruction, but I suspect this is a 16mm copy of what would have originally been 35mm, and 16mm was never made with nitrate stock. A great many historic Hollywood films only survive in edited versions from which all kinds of things were cut out, for reasons we can never know today.
This number reminds me so much of the “All I Do Is Dream Of You” number in Singin’ in the Rain. The costumes, the choreography, even the tune look and sound so much like that Debbie Reynolds number.
Yep, just in time for the great depression. New fashions include hessian sacks and newspapers and barrels. You seem to be under the impression that no one had tattoos then.
Man, I am so very glad for one thing in life…was in my late teens thru mid’s during the 80’s and that I wasn’t a young man during the roaring Twenties, my great grandmother’s generation. This would have driven me insane and the major reason was high pitched singing and lack of bass, in anything.
Doing the Charleston while saying snake hips 💁🏻♀️, that is all that is going on. Wish they could have gotten some input from bellydancers in that era to give them some direction how to move hips 🤣
