Thousand Ways There Are to Move: Camp and Oriental Dance in the Hollywood Musicals of Jack Cole1, The

Journal for the Anthropological Study of Human Movement, Spring 2003 by McLean, Adrienne L

In 1941, "Jack Cole and Company" appeared as a specialty in their first movie, Walter Lang's musical Moon Over Miami, with Betty Grable. Among the twenty-seven films that followed were the Rita Hayworth films Cover Girl (Charles Vidor, 1944), Tonight and Every Night (Victor Saville, 1945), Gilda (Charles Vidor, 1946), and Down to Earth (Alexander Hall, 1947, in which Cole staged a satirical Denishawn-style "Greek Ballet"); The Jolson Story (Alfred E. Green, 1947); On the Riviera (Walter Lang, 1951); David and Bathsheba (Henry King, 1951); The Merry Widow (Curtis Bernhardt, 1952); Three for the Show (H. C. Potter, 1955, which featured a dream sequence about a male harem); the two Kismets; Les Girls (George Cukor, 1957); and the Marilyn Monroe films Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Howard Hawks, 1953), River of No Return (Otto Preminger, 1954 ), There's No Business Like Show Business (Walter Lang, 1954), Some Like It Hot (Billy Wilder, 1959), and Let's Make Love (George Cukor, 1960). Even though he did not always receive screen credit, Cole was responsible for virtually all of Marilyn Monroe's film numbers; he worked closely with her on the nonmusical portions of her films as well. Cole himself appeared as a dancer in many of his films, and he had an acting and dancing role in Vincente Minnelli's Designing Woman (1957).24

Whether or not a Cole number had any apparent ethnic basis (e.g., Latin American, Spanish, oriental) in musical rhythm or dance style, Cole eschewed elaborate sets and extravagant costumes unless they were called for by either a film's narrative (e.g., the Denishawn parody "Greek Ballet" in Down to Earth, the "oriental splendor" of Kismet, the outre cabaret excesses of Les Girls) or features of a star's image (Grable, Hayworth, or Monroe dressed in skimpy, tight, or flamboyantly decorated dresses). Cole often used bare or sparsely decorated sets-a single tree branch, a couple of raised platforms, a draped curtain-in order to make dance itself the most visually interesting component of the mise-en-scene.

When the situation called for it, however, Cole could exceed or at least match Liberace in "outrageous display." In the "Greek Ballet" in Down to Earth,25 for example, Cole spotlights the spectacular status of women, but he also insists on the spectacularity of men-in large and oiled numbers, either nearly naked or in jewelry and "skirts." In the Latin American "You Excite Me" from Tonight and Every Night, the women wear fetishistic fur bras and hairpieces and split skirts, the men gigantic ruffled sleeves or cut-off T-shirts and tight pants. Marilyn Monroe's "Heat Wave" number from There's No Business Like Show Business surrounds her with near-naked sweat-drenched men in tight Bermuda shorts. In Cole's works, then, there is what Eve Sedgwick calls a "coming to visibility of the normally implicit terms of a coercive double bind": namely, that being a "man's man is separated only by an invisible, carefully blurred, always-already-crossed line from being interested in men" (Ibid., 89). The "coercive double bind" Cole engages is that women and men are prisoners of gender roles. Unlike the dances of Shawn or St. Denis, Jack Cole's use the body's physical beauty to stand for more than spiritual power. Cole's dance combines the theatricality and spirituality of Denishawn, the voluptuousness and intensity of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, and indigenous American as well as oriental and other ethnic dance styles. Most important, Cole's approach to dance and gender, like that of Ted Shawn and his Men Dancers, had profound effects on dominant or at least hegemonic dance culture. "Cole technique" became the basis of American jazz dance, and his influence can be seen even today in theater and film dance (Loney 1984: 353).26