Celebration. That’s the only word that really fits 1943’s Stormy Weather. More than ‘musical’, more than ‘comedy’, more than ‘biography’, hell even more than ‘film’, the word which first springs to mind to encompass the experience of watching Stormy Weather is: Celebration. Here is a film which happily eschews drama and story to better focus on bringing a spotlight to a once-in-a-generation assemblage of talent.
Of course, there is a story to Stormy Weather, new on Blu-ray thanks to Twilight Time. Stormy Weather tells the tale of Bill Williamson (a clear mock-up of Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, who plays his own stand-in) and his rise from humble beginnings as a veteran to a showbiz luminary. Along the way, “Williamson” finds himself stumbling across an incredible assortment of black entertainers, crossing paths with some of the finest musical talent that this nation has still yet to produce.
As an all-African-American musical, Stormy Weather acts as a showcase for a huge variety of black performers, where stars such as Cab “Boys, you got to learn not to talk to nuns that way” Calloway, Fats Waller, and Ada Brown all take center stage and bring the house down with incredible numbers. Lena Horne plays the female lead, Selina Rogers, and the film repeatedly stops cold just to admire what a gorgeous woman Horne was, and just how breathtaking her voice was at full strength, with Horne’s rendition of the titular ‘Stormy Weather’ an effective capper for the 70 preceding minutes of incredible talent.
And that’s not even discussing the highly choreographed dance routines by Robinson and many others, with a sit-down/shut-up climax by the Nicholas Brothers that actually freaking hurts to watch, so remarkable is the spectacle of those two leapfrogging over each other to land in splits before leaping again. It’s a dance sequence as lovingly shot as anything in Gene Kelly or Fred Astaire’s catalog, and with the same jaw-dropping physicality you look for from the likes of Jackie Chan or Buster Keaton. These two appear to be honest-to-God defying gravity with the way they dance across that stage. In fact, a USA Today obituary for Fayard Nicholas stated that Fred Astaire had dubbed this “Jumpin’ Jive” sequence as the greatest movie musical number he’d ever seen.
Robinson narrates his story to a collection of kids, and the flashback structure allows the film to skip over giant chunks of time and bypass any and all drama concerns. Robinson will simply declare that he went on to have his own show and bam, the film cuts from him being a penniless background dancer to headlining his own show. Even inter-scene drama is skipped. At one point, Robinson’s show is close to ruin as dancers threaten to quit if they are not paid soon, and the matter is settled as a character who had previously spoken three lines steps out of the background to produce a big wad of cash.
Normally I would roll my eyes at a musical so abandoning narrative basics to emphasize numbers which bear no real meaning to the story or characters (it took me a couple years to come around on Singing in the Rain for this exact reason, and also because I’m an asshole) but the palpable joy and mind-shredding ability that this cast brings to bear in every single scene powers through any such petty concerns. The film opens with an amazing setpiece of music and dancing, and then keeps topping itself until the grand finale brings a host of incredible talent together for an extended performance that left me legitimately physically exhausted.
As flat as some of the cast can be in the dialogue scenes, you have to shrug it off in deference to the impossible-to-replicate skill and abandon with which they tackle the song and dancing sequences. And director Andrew L. Stone was smart enough to bring in Dooley Wilson to play Robinson/Williamson’s best friend who stumbles into and out of bankruptcy at an incredible rate. Wilson has an easy charisma, and he lands every punchline with aplomb, ably keeping the movie moving even when the singing stops. Wilson is now probably best known as Sam from Casablanca, and never amounted to much else on the big screen. It’s a tragedy that someone with such an innate knowledge of how to play to the camera could have so few efforts to really shine.
And that unfortunate tragedy hangs over the film, an unspoken specter of America’s racial history. There’s not a single white face to be found here, but even without any onscreen demonstrations of racism or segregation, there’s no shaking it from history. A number of the musical numbers feature cringe-inducing minstrel show imagery, while another scene finds two black comedians applying burnt cork blackface to darken their skin for a comedy number.
Watching the iconography of prejudice and intolerance haunt a film so single-mindedly celebratory, it’s enough to make you sick. Stormy Weather, then, becomes important not only as time capsule of talent, not only as entertaining time at the movies, but as a living document to America’s history with race, and the way that everyone struggled to stand out from underneath it. Here’s a movie all about African-American talent, but produced and directed by white men. Does having that minstrel-show element negate the good? Is it possible to produce a work that is free of our dubious-at-fucking-best history with race?
I don’t know. But what I can say is that, so far as musicals goes, Stormy Weather is an underappreciated gem. As both artifact and entertainment, it is a damn fine way to spend an evening.