Singin' and Dancing Back in Time.: The Stork Club (1945).

Sunday, February 27, 2011

The Stork Club (1945).

The Stork Club (1945). Directed by Hal Walker. Cast: Betty Hutton , Barry Fitzgerald and Don DeFore.

A hat check girl at New York's famous Stork Club nightclub, Judy Peabody, saves an elderly man from drowning. He turns out to be Jerry Bates, who Judy, believes to be poor man.

Pop tells his lawyer to give Judy any thing her heart desires, anonymously. Judy's, dream is for her bandleader boyfriend Danny, to return home from the Marines, so she can sing with his band.

Before long she finds herself in a beautiful apartment, free of charge and a line of credit at a up scale department store. She buys dresses and furs, without knowing who is supporting her.

Judy finds "Pop" a job as a busboy, but that turns out to be a disaster, so she invites Pop to stay at her apartment. Danny comes home, looking forward to seeing her until he sees the apartment, the clothes and the older man. Believing her to be a "kept" woman, he decides to move on .

Billingsley is invited by Judy to hear the band. Impressed, he gives them a job at the club.

Will Judy ever find out that "Pop" is responsible for giving her all these wonderful things and will she win back Danny?

If you are fan of Betty Hutton and movies during the WWII era, with a fun story and a couple of good musical numbers. This movie is for you.

Fun Fact:

The movie, included as a character Sherman Billingsley the owner of the real stork club. During the movie, he talks to Danny, Judy's fiancee telling him that his wife and two daughters were the only women in his life. This is contradictory to the real life Sherman, who had a longtime affair with Ethel Merman.

Barry Fitzgerald (10 March 1888 – 14 January 1961), is the older brother of Irish actor Arthur Shields. By 1929, he turned to acting full-time. He was a roommate of playwright, Sean O'Casey, for a short time.

Fitzgerald went to Hollywood to star in the film, The Plough and the Stars (1936), directed by John Ford. His other performances: The Long Voyage Home (1940), How Green Was My Valley (1941), And Then There Were None (1945), The Naked City (1948), and The Quiet Man (1952). Fitzgerald achieved a feat unmatched in the history of the Academy Awards: he was nominated for both the Best Actor Oscar and the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for the same performance, as "Father Fitzgibbon" in the film, Going My Way (1944). (Academy Award rules have since been changed to prevent this.) He won the Best Supporting Actor Award; he broke the head off his Oscar statue while practising his golf swing. (During World War II, Oscar statues were made of plaster instead of gold, owing to wartime metal shortages.)

Barry Fitzgerald movies I have seen:

Bringing Up Baby (1938)
The Sea Wolf (1941)
Going My Way (1944)
The Stork Club (1945)
Easy Come, Easy Go (1947)
The Naked City (1948)
The Story of Seabiscuit (1949)
The Quiet Man (1952)
The Catered Affair (1956)

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Bob Fosse

Was a musical theater choreographer and director, screenwriter and film director. He won an eight Tony Awards for choreography, as well as one for direction. He was nominated for an Academy Award four times, winning for his direction of Cabaret. He was identified with his third wife, Gwen Verdon. She was both the dancer/collaborator who he choreographed much of his work and, together with dancer/choreographer Ann Reinking, a guardian of the Fosse legacy after his death. Fosse is considered to be one the most influential coreographers of the 20th Century.

Esther Williams.

JANE POWELL

After rising to fame as a singer in her home state of Oregon, Powell was signed to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer while still in her teens. Once there, the studio utilized her vocal, dancing and acting talents, casting her in such musicals as Royal Wedding, with Fred Astaire, A Date with Judy, with friend Elizabeth Taylor and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, with Howard Keel. In the late 1950s, her film career slowed, only to be replaced with a busy theater and television career.Click picture to enter websight.

Jeanette MacDonald

Singer and actress best remembered for her musical films of the 1930s with Maurice Chevalier (Love Me Tonight, The Merry Widow) and Nelson Eddy (Naughty Marietta, Rose-Marie, and Maytime). During the 1930s and 1940s she starred in 29 feature films, four nominated for Best Picture Oscars (The Love Parade, One Hour With You, Naughty Marietta and San Francisco), and recorded extensively, earning three gold records. She later appeared in grand opera, concerts, radio, and television. MacDonald was one of most influential sopranos of the 20th century. Click picture to view fan website.

Joan Crawford.

Click picture to view website. Joan Crawford, born Lucille Fay LeSueur, was an American actress in film, television and theatre. Starting as a dancer in traveling theatrical companies before debuting on Broadway, Crawford was signed to a motion picture contract by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1925. Initially frustrated by the size and quality of her parts, Crawford began a campaign of self-publicity and became nationally known as a flapper by the end of the 1920s. In the 1930s, Crawford's fame rivaled MGM colleagues Norma Shearer and Greta Garbo. Crawford often played hardworking young women who find romance and financial success. These "rags-to-riches" stories were well-received by Depression-era audiences and were popular with women. Crawford became one of Hollywood's most prominent movie stars and one of the highest paid women in the United States, but her films began losing money and by the end of the 1930s

Rodgers and Hammerstein.

Richard Rodgers (1902 – 1979) and Oscar Hammerstein II (1895 – 1960) the songwriting duo, on our musical page. They created many popular Broadway musicals in the 1940s and 1950s during what is considered the golden age. With Rodgers composing the music and Hammerstein writing the lyrics, five of their shows, Oklahoma!, Carousel, South Pacific, The King and I and The Sound of Music. They won thirty-four Tony Awards, fifteen Academy Awards, the Pulitzer Prize, and two Grammys. Click picture to read movie reviews.

Cab Calloway

Calloway was a master of energetic scat singing and led one of the United States' most popular African American big bands from the start of the 1930s through the late 1940s. Calloway's band featured performers including trumpeters Dizzy Gillespie and Adolphus "Doc" Cheatham, saxophonists Ben Webster and Leon "Chu" Berry, New Orleans guitar ace Danny Barker, and bassist Milt Hinton. Calloway continued to perform until his death in 1994 at the age of 86 .Click picture to view official website.

Sunday, February 27, 2011

The Stork Club (1945).

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