Stormy Weather was a world apart, even, from another picture released earlier that year, Cabin in the Sky: While that picture - the first big-ticket Hollywood film with an all-black cast -- certainly represented a leap of progress in terms of how people of color were represented in Hollywood cinema, its themes were somewhat biblical, pitching Lena Horne's bad gal against Ethel Waters' woman of virtue. Stormy Weather, set in a different milieu, the world of entertainers, didn't completely ignore the struggles faced by African Americans in midcentury America. But it cast those issues in a different light, presenting them as potentially surmountable with talent and hard work. The characters in Stormy Weather may struggle, but they want - and ultimately get - the same things that all Americans would have wanted at the time: Respect and remuneration for doing good work, enough money on which to live well, the love of a good man or woman. Is the plot of Stormy Weather 100 per cent realistic? Of course not. But the movie presents something more important than realism: It's a fantasy version of an America that might have been if Americans of all colors had, literally and figuratively, been sitting at the same table.
Stormy Weather's plot is mere connective tissue for a series of glorious song-and-dance numbers. As the movie opens, Bill Robinson, playing a version of himself named Bill Williamson, amuses a bunch of neighborhood kids with his dancing and also, in the course of answering their curious-kid questions, tells the story of his life: He served his country in World War I, only to return to a life of menial work; he worked hard, with a few strokes of luck along the way, to become a top entertainer; and he met and fell in love with another entertainer, a sultry singer named Selina Rogers (Lena Horne), who adored him but who didn't want the same things he hoped to get out of life. As the picture charts the ups and downs of Selina and Bill's relationship, it also makes room for superb performances from the likes of Cab Calloway (a marvel of swinging elegance in his baggy, draped suits), the Nicholas Brothers, Fayard and Harold (who execute a jaw-dropping number, on a staircase no less, at the end of the movie) and Fats Waller (in his most extensive movie performance, filmed shortly before his death in 1943). As if that weren't enough, the picture provides a phenomenal showcase for Horne, who slinks her way through several musical numbers including the title song, which would of course become her signature.
Stormy Weather was groundbreaking, but only in a quiet way. In their book Radical Hollywood: The Untold Story Behind America's Favorite Movies, Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner point out that the Office of War Information (OWI), formed in 1942, was eager to work with Hollywood to bolster national pride on the home front, and improving race relations was part of that plan. Though Buhle and Wagner note that the race issue wasn't necessarily a high OWI priority, it did provide the impetus for left-leaning filmmakers and writers in Hollywood to get pictures like Cabin in the Sky and Stormy Weather off the ground. Stormy Weather placed the emphasis on comedy and dance routines that might have been seen in black honky-tonks or nightclubs, providing a means for black audiences to see themselves - in roles other than mammies or servants - on the big screen. And yet Stormy Weather was a breakthrough that almost didn't come to be: According to Buhle and Wagner, Twentieth Century Fox, the studio behind the picture, considered pulling it from distribution, and fewer than half of Fox's affiliated theaters even showed it.
Even so, Stormy Weather was a hit in theaters, and even if most of the ticket buyers were black Americans, the ever-stuffy (and very white) New York Times reviewed the picture positively. In fact, the paper's critic seemed crazy about it: "To single out each entertainer and skit for even a sentence would run this report to considerable length," he wrote. "In short, 'swell' is the adjective for all twelve of the principal turns."
Perhaps that's not so surprising: White America has generally been perfectly willing to enjoy performances by black entertainers -as long as that didn't mean sharing the same restaurants, hotels, night clubs, rest rooms and drinking fountains with them. As Donald Bogle relates in Bright Boulevards, Bold Dreams: The Story of Black Hollywood, the Nicholas brothers in particular spoke of having problems in the Fox commissary during the filming of Stormy Weather. The dance duo, Hollywood veterans by that time, were used to the more egalitarian atmosphere of MGM's commissary, which served lunch to about twelve hundred performers daily, from executives to big stars to extras. At Fox, however, Fayard recalls that he and his brother "were consigned to 'a special little restaurant. And that's where they wanted us to go.'" The restaurant was not even on the same floor as the commissary, and the Nicholas brothers refused to go there.
As exuberant and fanciful as Stormy Weather is, the picture wasn't made in a vacuum, and beneath its glossy surface lie hints of a much harder reality for black Americans. Buhle and Wagner write, "Notwithstanding the [movie's] Hollywood finish, the reality of unrewarded talent and a subproletarian life for ordinary African-Americans is never far from the surface." Even so, Stormy Weather, with its shimmery, luxe-on-a-budget costumes and go-for-broke dance numbers, speaks a truth that goes far beyond wish fulfillment. It sets a place for African Americans at the nation's table, and the tableware is solid sterling, gleaming, intrinsically valuable, and impossible to ignore. The movie is a shout, defiant and exuberant, that can be summed up in two words: We belong.
Producer: William LeBaron
Director: Andrew Stone
Screenplay: Frederick Jackson, Ted Koehler (screenplay); H.S. Kraft (adaptation); Jerry Horwin, Seymour B. Robinson (original story)'
Cinematography: Leon Shamroy; Lee Garmes (uncredited)
Art Direction: James Basevi, Joseph C. Wright
Music: Cyril J. Mockridge (uncredited)
Film Editing: James B. Clark
Cast: Lena Horne (Selina Rogers), Bill Robinson (Bill Williamson), Cab Calloway and His Band, Katherine Dunham and Her Troupe, Fats Waller, Nicholas Brothers, Ada Brown, Dooley Wilson (Gabe Tucker).
BW-78m.
by Stephanie Zackarek
SOURCES:
The New York Times
Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner, Radical Hollywood: The Untold Story Behind America's Favorite Movies, The New Press, 2002
Donald Bogle, Bright Boulevards, Bold Dreams: The Story of Black Hollywood, One World Books/Random House, 2005
