Eddie Cantor as a beauty expert in blackface

Jaime J. Weinman, over on the Something Old, Something New blog, has posted a cogent analysis of this bizarre and rather amazingly offensive Busby Berkely number from the 1933 musical comedy Roman Scandals. Not only does it feature Eddie Cantor in blackface, but he's singing to a group of women about how they better "keep young and beautiful" if they want to be loved. If Cantor started clubbing baby seals in the middle of this thing, it could hardly be any less p.c.

If you stick around, Cantor does experience a comeuppance of sorts. I really can't improve on Weinman's commentary:

The strange thing about the number is that as it progresses and gets more and more surreal and bizarre -- the usual pattern of a Berkeley number -- it almost seems to be rebelling against itself. First it betrays one of the rules of a blackface number by having the dancers actually notice that Cantor is a white guy in blackface, and get quite angry at him for it. Then the two groups of dancers, black and white, who were originally separated from each other, join together and team up against their common enemy: Cantor, the white guy pretending to be black, the man telling them all how they should look. They use one of the beauty treatments they had to go through to "keep young and beautiful" as an instrument of torture against Cantor, pumping their fists in revolutionary style

I doubt Berkeley actually intended this to be some kind of act of revolution against the traditional blackface number or girlie number. But he would follow his crazy ideas wherever they took him, and that's where this particular idea seems to take him: the chorus girls take over the number, stage a coup, and kill the star.

Two things to watch for:

1. Apparently one of the chorus girls is a young Lucille Ball, although I didn't spot her.
2. Around the 3:25 mark we come a lot closer to "side boob" than you'd expect to see in 1933.




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