GO INTO YOUR DANCE (Archie Mayo, Michael Curtiz, Robert Florey, 1935)

One of the most richly scored, dazzlingly entertaining Hollywood musicals ever, and perhaps my father’s favorite film, Go Into Your Dance was directed by Archie Mayo, although a few extraneous, inserted scenes were directed by others. Al Jolson is brilliant as Al Howard, a stage star trying to get back into the business after walking out on one show too many. Rebuffed, Howard aims to produce his own musical show with the financial backing of mobster Duke Hutchinson, who wants his wife, Luana, to have the comeback she desires. To steady her career jitters, though, Luana advances sexually on Al, tossing everything into jeopardy, including Al’s life.
     Arguably the greatest musical entertainer of all time, Jolson claims here his most electrifying onscreen delivery of a song—and what a song it is: “She’s a Latin from Manhattan,” music by Harry Warren, lyrics by Al Dubin: “. . . She can take her tambourine and whack it,/ But to her it’s just a racket;/ She’s a hoofer from Fifth Avenu-ue./ She’s a Latin from Manhattan,/ She’s a 42nd Streeter;/ She’s a Latin from Manhattan,/ Señorita Donahue.” All the film’s thematic strands beautifully come together in this song, including American self-reinvention, theatrical illusion, moral transvestism. With its Gatsbyism delightfully deepened by Jolson’s sexual ambiguity, this may be the best song Warren and Dubin ever created (although they won Oscars that same year for “Lullaby of Broadway” in Gold-Diggers of 1935). Throughout, the dancing is wonderful, but it is specifically for the “Latin from Manhattan” number that choreographer Bobby Connelly was Oscar-nominated.
     Jolson and then-wife Ruby Keeler are warm and hilarious together (this is also Keeler’s best performance), and Helen Morgan, as Luana, hauntingly sings “The Little Things You Used to Do.”

NADA (Claude Chabrol, 1974)

In the shadow of the Algerian War and the 1968 uprising and brutal reprisals, authority, once sancrosanct in France, has crumbled as a shibboleth. Look at poor Treuffais, university professor, who commands so little respect in his own classroom! Treuffais belongs to the Nada gang, an anarchic group fueled less by conviction than by revolutionary nostalgia—a remnant of 1968 aspirations. Épaulard, openly disillusioned, is nonetheless impressed into the current cause, the plan to kidnap the U.S. ambassador; Épaulard is impotent, both politically and sexually. Meanwhile, young D’Arey (Lou Castel, briefly vivid), upon downing a motorcycle cop—with a Davidian slingshot after his gun jams (stymied Leftist weaponry proves a motif here)—says aloud to himself before shouting it to the Parisian night air, “Now I’m a killer!” as though he were a kid who had just lost his virginity. Diaz is the one male member of the gang to possess gravitas, but this is undercut by his ending up by hugging Épaulard, an old comrade, whom (before learning his identity) he had meant to assassinate. For this bunch, including fierce Cash, the one female member, things are doomed to go awry.
     Director Claude Chabrol makes no such mistake as Constantin Costa-Gavros did with Z (1969); he has fashioned a taut thriller whose tone doesn’t get away from him. Nada is bereft of any comical foolishness. Chabrol’s film is dead-serious, as the life of the kidnapped ambassador recedes from importance on both sides, one of which seeks correction of its psychological imbalance, the other of which pursues a political agenda. The latter, the police, in trying to reassert authority proves only how incompetent they are except when it comes to one thing: killing.
     Chabrol’s heart, like the gang’s, half-resides in 1968. His head has moved on.