"Get ready for the big show of the year! It's headed your way! It's the picture everybody's talking about, with a captivating star everybody's raving about! Meet the ravishing toast of the nation. The alluring international dancing sensation - Zorina, the most fascinating personality in motion pictures today!" raved the trailer for Warner Bros. adaptation of On Your Toes (1939).

Executive produced by Hal B. Wallis and directed by Ray Enright, from a screenplay by Jerry Wald and Richard Macaulay, with adaptation by Sig Herzig and Lawrence Riley, On Your Toes was based on the Broadway musical by Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart, and George Abbott. The play had been conceived as a film role for Fred Astaire, but Astaire turned it down. Rodgers later explained that "Astaire at that point in his career was a pretty chic fellow who usually wore white ties and tails, and the producers felt that there was no chance in our script for him to appear that way." The play ran for 315 performances at the Imperial Theater, with Ray Bolger. Tamara Geva and Monty Woolley. The British production, which played in London's West End, starred Jack Whiting and Vera Zorina. When the film was finally brought to Hollywood, Eddie Albert was Junior and Vera Zorina appeared as Vera.

The Dancing Dolans (James Gleason and Queenie Smith) had long been in vaudeville, but now in 1939, their son Junior (played by Donald O'Connor as a child and Albert as an adult) leaves the act to become a composer. He meets a Russian composer, Ivan Boultonoff (Leonid Kinskey) who offers to tutor him, but ends up stealing his jazz ballet called "Slaughter on Tenth Avenue," and selling it to Russian impresario Sergei Alexandrovitch (Alan Hale). Junior doesn't mind, because he's just resumed his romance with dancer Vera Barnova (Zorina), who he recognizes as the little Russian girl he fell in love with in vaudeville years before. When Junior substitutes for a missing dancer, his antics ruin the ballet, but delight the critics who think it's supposed to be funny. The ballet is retooled to be purposefully comic, and Junior continues with the show. Alexandrovitch, angry with Junior for changing his ballet, puts a hit out on his life. Also in the cast were Warner Bros. reliable supporting players like Frank McHugh as the stage manager, Reilly, and Gloria Dickson as Peggy Porterfield, Alexandrovitch's wealthy patron.

James Cagney had been set to star in On Your Toes when he suddenly dropped out, leaving Warner Bros. without a leading man. They quickly chose Albert, who had made a hit in Brother Rat (1938), but was appearing onstage in The Boys from Syracuse . He was quickly brought back to the studio to prepare for the part. Associate producer Robert Lord wrote to Hal Wallis, "It is not easy to make a picture about a dancer played by an actor who can't dance at all," and famed choreographer George Balanchine (who had just married Vera Zorina) had his own reservations about Albert's ability. In order to be convincing on the screen, Albert took tap dance lessons, and Balanchine worked with him to move properly. As Gary Marmorstein wrote, one morning, Balanchine and Albert were carpooling together to the Warner Bros., driving along San Vicente Boulevard, with Balanchine trying to explain a ballet move. Albert wasn't able to visualize it, so "Balanchine pulled the car over, got out, and said, 'Come, I show you!' Signaling for Albert to follow, Balanchine lunged across two lanes of traffic to the median. While passersby gaped, the two men practiced lifting each other.'"

The film was released on October 29, 1939 with the premiere at the Strand Theater in New York. It played well in big cities but it did not equal success in more rural areas. Frank Nugent, in his review for The New York Times , wrote that the film was "still [...] an ingratiating show [...] Zorina is lovely, Mr. Albert is almost as good as Mr. Bolger was and the score is just the same and just as fine. [But] there's nothing more discouraging than the sight of a cast, with its fingers in its ears and its eyes tight shut, pretending that its laugh-lines are exploding and not simply going 'pop.'

By Lorraine LoBianco

SOURCES:

Grimmond, Peter Oxford Companion to Popular Music
The Internet Movie Database
Nugent, Frank "The Screen; 'On Your Toes,' From the Rodgers and Hart Library, Opens at the Strand" The New York Times 21 Oct 39
Reid, John Howard More Movie Musicals
http://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/title/589/On-Your-Toes/