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That's Dancing
"That's Dancing" focuses on blending the greatest dancers and their contributions to the world of dance on film. Dance on Film was a new medium in the early thirties when a marriage between the camera and the dancer was born. This book features the ten giants of the dance world and brings their stories to life.
272 pages
First published May 30, 1985
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May 10, 2026
[These notes were made in 2004]. A companion volume to the movie of the same name, this book doesn't follow the structure of the film but has chapters as follows: Dancing - frame by frame; Fred Astaire; Busby Berkeley; Ray Bolger; Cyd Charisse; Ruby Keeler; Gene Kelly; Ann Miller; Gene Nelson; Donald O'Connor, Eleanor Powell.
[Additional notes made in 2026]. While the film aimed at few a striking and relatively complete film excerpts (and was avoiding duplication with the massively popular "That's Entertainment" movies that drew on the same MGM corpus), this book aims at a much more comprehensive consideration of the celebrity dancers chosen for its principal chapters: a somewhat idiosyncratic assortment, likely the choice of the sole author of the book, Tony Thomas, a film historian, rather than the originators of the film. (Why Charisse, Miller and Powell but not Vera-Ellen?) The book therefore lacks both the dedicated segment for ballet and the separate segment for Broadway-to-Hollywood adaptions, although there is discussion of both ballet and Broadway films in the main text. The final segment of the film, nodding to dance on film/video in the 1980s (John Travolta, Michael Jackson) is entirely absent, as are the opening generalizations about folk/indigenous dancing and New York street dancing.
[Additional notes made in 2026]. While the film aimed at few a striking and relatively complete film excerpts (and was avoiding duplication with the massively popular "That's Entertainment" movies that drew on the same MGM corpus), this book aims at a much more comprehensive consideration of the celebrity dancers chosen for its principal chapters: a somewhat idiosyncratic assortment, likely the choice of the sole author of the book, Tony Thomas, a film historian, rather than the originators of the film. (Why Charisse, Miller and Powell but not Vera-Ellen?) The book therefore lacks both the dedicated segment for ballet and the separate segment for Broadway-to-Hollywood adaptions, although there is discussion of both ballet and Broadway films in the main text. The final segment of the film, nodding to dance on film/video in the 1980s (John Travolta, Michael Jackson) is entirely absent, as are the opening generalizations about folk/indigenous dancing and New York street dancing.
Displaying 1 of 1 review