Stars: Lena Horne, Bill Robinson, Cab Calloway, Katherine Dunham, Dooley Wilson
Director: Andrew L. Stone
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars
Each month, as part of our 2020 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different actress known as an iconic "film sex symbol." This month, our focus is on Lena Horne-click here to learn more about Ms. Horne (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.
Looking at the career of Lena Horne presents a unique challenge that we haven't encountered in profiling any other star for this series to date. While we have looked at actresses who were lesser-known (think Ruth Roman last year), they were still "leading ladies" long enough to come up with four films where they played a central role in the picture. Otherwise, of course, they wouldn't generally be considered "stars." This isn't really the case for Horne. When she signed her contract with MGM in 1942, it was historic (the first African-American performer to sign a long-term star contract with a major studio), but MGM still had to deal with a South that wasn't willing to accept a black woman as a leading actress, and because there were few other black actors of her stature (and miscegenation laws precluded her from having an onscreen romance with a white man), she really only had small, cameo roles throughout her entire time at MGM...with two exceptions, only one of which was at her studio. The first of those was Stormy Weather, a film made not for MGM but for Fox, which was one of the first major studio endeavors to feature a nearly all-black cast.
(Spoilers Ahead) The movie focuses on Bill Williamson (Robinson), a great dancer who is struggling to make a name for himself as a performer alongside his randy friend Gabe (Wilson). They meet the beautiful Selina Rogers (Horne) on a night when she's singing (she's the sister of one of their fellow soldiers), and Bill is instantly smitten. Selina takes a shine to him as well, though another headliner is staking his claim on her heart (here played by Babe Wallace). The film shows how Bill continues to take a shine to Selina and welcomes stardom, but she chooses show business over him until the last act, while also indicating that Gabe's troublesome ways with women paid off as we see a flash forward to the future where he has multiple children. The movie ends with Bill and Selina reunited on the stage again, perhaps willing to start their romantic relationship once more.
The plot of Stormy Weather is thin, even by 1940's musical standards, and I'll be real here-the movie isn't that good. Putting aside the very, very big age gap between Horne and Robinson as paramours (at the time, Robinson was 65 and Horne was 26, and probably the only reason they were paired as they were two of the rare well-known black performers at the time), the movie goes on jaunts and tangents, and doesn't seem to have much interest in the two as a romantic couple. It's hard to blame the movie too much for this (I would imagine considering its place in history that it's going to be a struggle to put anything but musical numbers into a movie like this, for risk of Fox making a political statement), but it has to be said that as a modern viewer, it's hard to appreciate this as a cohesive picture rather than just an almost variety act, even if I understand its historic significance.
That said, some of the musical numbers are fun. Fats Waller (who died shortly after this movie was made) does a terrific version of "Ain't Misbehavin" and Ada Brown accompanies him in the saucy "That Ain't Right." Robinson is still one of the great dancers, but it's hard not to think of how much better his jumping on drums would have been twenty years earlier when he was in his prime. The best scene of all is Horne singing what would become her signature song, the titular "Stormy Weather." There's an extended sequence of Katherine Dunham dancing during this number (I gasped initially when I thought some of the background dancers were topless, but instead it was just a visual trick as they wore sheer leotards), but it's Horne that brings it together. Her powerful vocals and ability to put real emotion in them makes me excited as we continue to look at her this month, and also disappointed that she only got two chances to see her lead a picture-we'll get to the other movie she headlined next week.
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