The Movie Musical! by Jeanine Basinger

Author:Jeanine Basinger
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2019-11-04T16:00:00+00:00

The unstoppable Belita, ice-skating “rival” to Sonja Henie, but for less money, in Lady, Let’s Dance

B musicals are often sad little events as they work to achieve their goals. Lady, Let’s Dance (1944) is an example of a Monogram Picture starring Belita (“the Ice Maiden”), a British ice skater who was brought to Hollywood as potential competition for Sonja Henie. Belita was born in Hampshire, England, in 1923 as Maria Belita Jepson-Turner. Her background was not one of poverty: her father was a military officer and her mother the daughter of a royal physician. Furthermore, Belita was not a one-trick pony. She could not only skate but also do ballet (she studied with Anton Dolin), ballroom dancing, Latin numbers, a bit of tap, play the violin—and in case none of that worked, she spoke four languages. (“She skates, she romances, she dances,” promised the film’s posters.) She was raised by a classic example of the driving stage mother; Belita was trained for stardom as soon as she could walk. An excellent athlete, she took to ice skating more than anything else and qualified for the 1936 Winter Olympics at the age of twelve. By fourteen, she had turned professional, and soon she migrated to Hollywood (thanks to the Henie phenomenon) and first skated in a Hollywood movie as one of the ice dancers at Republic Pictures in Ice-Capades, in which another European skater trying to cash in on the Henie craze, the Czech Vera Hruba Ralston was billed low as “ice dancer.” Belita moved up to “Belita, Star on the Ice” in her next movie, Monogram’s Silver Skates (1943),*13 but her biggest musical movie as a Sonja Henie would-be is Lady, Let’s Dance. It was Monogram’s stab at turning her into a star, and she was optimistically billed over the title. The credits include not only “Dances staged by Dave Gould” but also the announcement that all “ballet under the personal direction of Michael Panaieff.”

Lady, Let’s Dance is nevertheless the cheap version of a Sonja Henie film. Belita plays a war refugee working as a waitress. Her character name is Belita—why waste anyone’s time and money trying to think up a name when she already had one, and it was the one you were trying to promote? That mind-set defines the look of the film. Why have two chairs when only one person is going to sit down? Why have two outfits for daytime for the leading lady when she can wear the same one twice the way real people do? Why spend any money if you can possibly avoid it?—and that includes the attitude toward the music. Belita can dance to Beethoven’s Fifth or to a bagful of popular tunes, so there’s no need to hire songwriters. What we can do, reasoned the studio and the producers, is spend money on what we are trying to promote: Belita as an ice-skating star to rival Sonja Henie. We can drum up a couple of new numbers, throw in

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