The movie has been put together by Jack Haley Jr. and David Niven Jr., and it recycles Haley's formula in "That's Entertainment!" (1974), the original slice-and-dice anthology from Hollywood's golden ages. There also has been a "That's Entertainment II" (or "too," I seem to recall), and the law of diminishing returns is beginning to apply. Sooner or later, we'll get "That's All, Folks!"
In the first movie, for example, we got Gene Kelly's immortal title dance number from "Singin' in the Rain"; in the second movie, we got Donald O'Connor's equally immortal "Make 'em Laugh" sequence, and that leaves Kelly and O'Connor's only somewhat immortal "Moses Supposes" number for this film. Pretty soon we're going to be getting "That's What's Left of Entertainment!"
"That'sDancing!" shares with the earlier movies an irritating compulsion to masquerade as a documentary, which it isn't. The tone is set by Kelly's opening generalizations about the universality of dance, etc., while we see National Geographic outtakes of dancing around the world: Tribes in Africa, hula skirts in Hawaii, polkas and geisha girls and so on. Kelly is later spelled by such other dance analysts as Liza Minnelli, Ray Bolger, Mikhail Baryshnikovand Sammy Davis Jr., all ofwhom can dance with a great deal more ease than they can recite pseudo-profundities.
There is, however, a lot of good dancing in this movie, including rare silent footage of Isadora Duncan. We see Busby Berkeley's meticulously choreographed dance geometries, the infinite style of Fred Astaire, the brassy joy of Ginger Rogers, the pizzazz of Cyd Charisse and Eleanor Powell, a charming duet between Bill "Bojangles" Robinson and Shirley Temple, and a dazzling display by the Nicholas Brothers, who were the inspiration for the dance team played by the Hines brothers in "Cotton Club." The movie is up to date, with John Travolta from "Saturday Night Fever" and footage from break-dance movies, "Flashdance," and Michael Jackson's "Thriller." But perhaps the most pleasing single moment in it is a little soft-shoe by James Cagney, who was perhaps not the technical equal of Astaire, but was certainly on the same sublime plane when it came to communicating sheer joy.
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