April 30 movie: Born to Dance. Another outing for Eleanor Powell and Buddy Ebsen. This one costars Jimmy Stewart, Virginia Bruce, Una Merkel and Sid Silvers, and includes music by Cole Porter and a really ridiculous plot. Stewart, Ebsen and Silvers play Navy men, which leads to a scene where Virginia Bruce's pomeranian dog falls over the side of a battleship, then two hundred sailors leap in after it, and somehow it isn't hurt.
Ebsen doesn't have any dance numbers as inspired as "Sing Before Breakfast," but he does get some nice moves in this ensemble number to a very, very lesser Cole Porter song:
Skip to about 2:30 to see Ebsen sing to and dance with Frances Langford, or watch the whole thing to see Eleanor Powell dancing (sort of -- she has to tone it way down so Stewart can keep up) and some charmingly terrible singing by Stewart. In the intro Robert Osborne said this movie was painful for Stewart to watch because of his singing voice. I'd probably also be horrified if I had to sing in public, much less in a movie, and my singing voice can't be as bad as his was. I really felt for him doing "Easy to Love." Not an easy song even for a talented singer. They had intended to dub his singing, as was commonly done at the time -- Powell is dubbed by Marjorie Lane in this movie. But the dubbing sounded really fake because Stewart's speaking voice is so distinctive. So they had Stewart do his own singing.
You can really tell Powell had ballet training by some of her dance moves. She does this one thing (in another number not on Youtube) where she kicks up until her foot touches her head -- ankle actually, she had long legs -- and then she bends over backward with her foot still in the air. Simply amazing.
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