When RKO released the show-biz musical Hooray for Love, in 1935, the studio was probably banking on the film as a showcase for rising stars Ann Sothern and Gene Raymond, both of whom are perfectly charming. But Hooray for Love -- featuring songs written by Dorothy Fields and Jimmy McHugh -- is most notable for a stylish, elaborate musical number featuring three great African-American performers of the day, figures who are influential to this day: Midway through Hooray for Love, Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, Fats Waller, and a very young, very willowy tap dancer known as Jeni Le Gon, hoof and sing their way through "Living in a Great Big Way," which tells, in a stylized fashion, the story of a woman who's evicted from her apartment by a greedy landlord. The woman, Le Gon, is tossed out onto the street with her belongings. The mayor of Harlem, Robinson, dressed in a natty three-piece suit complete with pocket square, bowler hat, and cane, comes along and reassures her that things aren't nearly as bad as they seem, as long as she "has a snap in her fingers" and "a rhythm in her walk." and Meanwhile, Waller - one of the movers charged with carrying Le Gon's things from her flat, can't resist sitting down at the piano, which has been put out by the curb, to perform a a jaunty call-and-response duet with Robinson.

"Living in a Great Big Way" is just one of the musical numbers in the show-within-a-show structure of Hooray for Love, directed by Walter Lang. Sothern plays a nightclub singer who's unimpressed by the college boy, Raymond, who has a crush on her. His hope is to put on a big Broadway show after he graduates, but nothing goes as he'd hoped. Then he meets a slick operator known as "the Commodore" (Thurston Hall), who hooks him up with a duo of producers who aren't all that they seem. The Commodore also happens to be Sothern's father. Sothern is happy enough to be in the show, but wants little to do with Raymond - until, of course, he wins her over with his peculiar brand of trying-too-hard charm, which actually is surprisingly endearing.

Raymond had been performing for years by the time he was cast in Hooray for Love: He'd attended the Professional Children's School in New York City, and had made his Broadway debut at age 17. In 1931, he made his first Hollywood film, Personal Maid, later earning leading roles in films like Rowland V. Lee's charming Zoo in Budapest (1933). (Raymond was the husband of Jeanette MacDonald; the two were married from 1937 until her death in 1965.) In 1935, Sothern, a saucy blonde with a wry demeanor and a knack for comedy, was still a relative newcomer, having played a number of uncredited roles throughout the early 1930s. She was signed by Columbia pictures in 1933, only to be dropped in 1936, at which time she moved to RKO. (In 1939, she would move to MGM, playing the title role in the comedy Maisie, the first film of what would become a popular series stretching well into the 1940s.)

Raymond and Sothern proved to have a spark of on-screen chemistry and went on to make several other films together, including Walking on Air and Smartest Girl in Town (both 1936) and There Goes My Girl and She's Got Everything (both 1937). In Hooray for Love, their numbers together - particularly the finale, "I'm in Love All Over Again" - are appealing in a low-key way. But nothing else in Hooray for Love quite compares to the casually magnificent "Living in a Great Big Way," which marked the first Hollywood appearance of both the always-wonderful Waller and the lesser-known, but marvelous, Le Gon. (Robinson had appeared earlier that year with Shirley Temple in The Little Colonel.) Le Gon is terrific in "Living in a Great Big Way," a charismatic performer who preferred to perform in pants - in this number, she's dressed in lanky trousers and simple white polo neck. Le Gon had a long career as a dancer, singer, and actress, and taught dance until the end of her life: She died in 2012 at age 96. In Le Gon's New York Times obituary, Bruce Weber lauded her as "the rare female tapper who distinguished herself as a solo performer in the first half of the 20th century" and noted that, partly as a result of her preference for pants over skirts, she "developed an athletic, acrobatic style, employing mule kicks and flying splits, more in the manner of the male dancers of the time." Le Gon herself said, in an interview with The Globe and Mail of Toronto in 2009, "I could do the girls' splits, but I used the boys' splits because you could get up faster." That agility is all on display in "Living in a Great Big Way," one of the treasures of African-American performance in Hollywood, nestled in a movie where you wouldn't think to look for it.

By Stephanie Zacharek

SOURCES:
The New York Times
IMDb