5 Movies | Wednesday, February 2, beginning 8 p.m.
Does anyone today remember the conga line? A dance party craze beginning in the 1930s, peaking in the 40s and continuing into the 50s, it’s certainly familiar to older generations, wedding guests and lovers of classic movies, like the five pictures showing on this special night – talk about some niche programming!
The conga is a group line dance (the bigger the group, the better) that derived from Cuban carnival dances (and, often disputed, from West African slave traditions). Dancers form a long line behind each other, with their hands placed on the hips or shoulders of the person in front of them. They proceed in a kind of stylized march with three shuffle steps on the beat followed by a kick just ahead of the fourth beat. Or as Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland vocalized it in the popular teen movie Strike Up the Band (1940): “One, two, three – Boom!”
One of the night’s five lively features, the Garland-Rooney musical about a musician and singer hoping to hit it big with their high school dance band may have been the first movie to showcase the conga in a big way, but it had been in American culture for several years by then, first gaining attention in 1929 at the La Conga nightclub in Manhattan. By the late 30s, it was well known in New York.
Although released a month after that picture, Too Many Girls (1940) is more rightfully credited as the one that brought the craze to mainstream America. Around the beginning of the 1940s, American entertainment, particularly Hollywood movies, became enthralled with South American culture, albeit in a highly bowdlerized and romanticized form. Among the performers who benefited from this trend were was a dynamic, sexy, conga drum-playing young performer named Desi Arnaz. A successful nightclub act in New York, he was cast in Rodgers and Hart’s Broadway musical “Too Many Girls” in 1939. RKO bought the rights to the hit show, bringing Arnaz with it to end the college-set story with an energetic and uninhibited version of the dance. Arnaz may have set Ann Miller’s feet on fire with his Cuban beat, but he ended up with another co-star, Lucille Ball, as his wife.
The next year saw the conga pop up in two more studio releases. Betty Grable, well on her way to becoming a top female star of the war years, led a group of dancers through a sanitized and less frenetic version in Moon Over Miami (1941). Set to children’s nursery rhymes (huh?!), the number was appropriately called “Kindergarten Conga.”
Barbara Stanwyck put some oomph into the dance in Howard Hawks’ hilarious screwball comedy Ball of Fire (1941). As a nightclub star hiding out from her gangster boyfriend in the home of some stuffy academics, Stanwyck’s Sugarpuss O’Shea teaches the professors how to one, two, three – boom, much to the dismay of their disapproving housekeeper and an uptight, bookish Gary Cooper. Very loosely inspired by the fairy tale “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” (filmed by Walt Disney four years earlier), the picture has Cooper and Stanwyck falling for each other while she teaches him the finer points of American slang and what was then hip contemporary pop culture.
The conga took a more circuitous route to the screen for the evening’s first spotlight film My Sister Eileen (1955). The comedy of two sisters from Ohio trying to make it big in New York was based on a series of short stories by Ruth McKenney about her adventures in Greenwich Village with her younger sister. Originally published in The New Yorker, the stories inspired a hit Broadway production starring Shirley Booth that ran more than two years. Columbia Pictures adapted it for the screen in 1942, with Rosalind Russell and Janet Blair as the sisters, getting caught in a conga line with some overly amorous sailors.
In 1953, Leonard Bernstein, Betty Comden and Adolph Green added songs to it and successfully mounted it on Broadway as “Wonderful Town,” with Russell once again taking on the leading role. You would think that musical version would have been ripe for the big screen, but when the film rights proved to be too expensive, Columbia head Harry Cohn commissioned a totally new score and went to great pains to keep it from looking too much like “Wonderful Town” to avoid legal issues. The conga, however, made it intact into the new picture in 1955 (starring Betty Garrett, Janet Leigh and Jack Lemmon) by virtue of its being part of the 1942 Columbia release. And the beat goes on…
