Hollywood Steps Out
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Hollywood Steps Out is a 1941 short cartoon by Warner Brothers, directed by Tex Avery, that features caricatures of Hollywood celebrities of the day. The setting is at the famed Ciro's nightclub, where they are seen having dinner. Bing Crosby appears as the Master of Ceremonies; he has to shoo his race horse off the stage. The stars then start dancing to music by conductor Leopold Stokowski.
One attractive feature of the short is the "bubble dance" made famous by Sally Rand (who did not give permission to use her image in this short, and was replaced by the fictional "Sally Strand"). She does this dance in lieu of her equally famous fan dance, as she had "checked" her fans at the coatroom earlier in the cartoon. While performing the dance, she stripteases by manuvering the bubble in such a way that she reveals her nudity partially but never exposes her intimate parts (hence "teasing" the male audience, as well as stripping due to the fact that she wears the bubble in front of her, acting like her clothing, only it is not worn on the body, but rather used as an object to cover up her nudity). As she is doing the dance, the male audience reacts to the dance in different ways. Peter Lorre, ironically, admires the "beautiful bubble," which glows a bright white color to nearly match her skin color (along with the spotlight on her), that he hasn't seen since he was a child, rather than the nude woman, while Kay Kyser remarks "Students!" and his students whistle and say "Baby!" in unison. Before the end of the dance, she lifts her bububle up in the air, and it gracefully comes back down. Harpo Marx uses a pea shooter, literally bursting her bubble. She reacts with shock (although it turns out she is wearing a barrel) and the curtain closes to signal the end of the erotic dance. Clark Gable has been doing the conga across the room, following an alluring blond woman; as the film ends he demands a kiss--but the hair falls off and it turns out the "woman" is Groucho Marx.
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[edit] Censorship
- When aired on The WB!, two scenes are cut: one where Greta Garbo (as a cigarette girl) offers Cary Grant a cigarette and lights it with the sole of her large high heeled shoe and another where Harpo Marx puts a row of matches under Garbo's shoe and lights them, giving her a hotfoot, only to have her slowly react to the pain.
- It's been said that there could be long lost footage involving the running gag where Clark Gable pursues a blond woman who turns out to be Groucho Marx in drag, particularly an ending where Gable kisses Marx after finding out that he's not a woman. Since this footage hasn't surfaced, not even in the DVD version shown on second volume of the Golden Collection series, there is no way this claim can be proven. However, in some prints the music at the end continues to play and then suddenly stops, suggesting that new closing music has been recorded for the reissue.
[edit] Stars Caricatured
- Cary Grant
- Greta Garbo
- Johnny Weissmuller
- Clark Gable
- Edward G. Robinson
- Ann Sheridan
- Harpo Marx
- James Cagney
- Leon Schlesinger
- Henry Binder
- Humphrey Bogart
- George Raft
- Bing Crosby
- Claudette Colbert
- Leopold Stokowski
- Oliver Hardy
- Tyrone Power
- Sonja Henie
- Boris Karloff
- The Three Stooges
- James Stewart
- Dorothy Lamour
- Mickey Rooney
- Rita Hayworth
- Judy Garland
- Lewis Stone
- Peter Lorre
- Cesar Romero
- Sally Rand
- Kay Kyser
- Henry Fonda
- Buster Keaton
- Wallace Beery
- William Powell
- C. Aubrey Smith
- George Brent
- Errol Flynn
- Spencer Tracy
- Ned Sparks
- Mischa Auer
- Arthur Treacher
- J. Edgar Hoover
- Jerry Colonna
- Groucho Marx
[edit] Trivia
- In the bubble dance scene, it is important to note that when the fictional Sally Strand does her bubble dance that her actual nudity is never shown, but rather implied. When she lifts her bubble up in the air in the end the screen rises to follow the bubble, therefore implying her total nudity.
- In one showing of the short, there are actually variants as to how the cartoons runs. In some versions, Cary Grant, the first person who we see in the short, would say "...I'd land it," but in other versions he would say "...I'd land right on the front page." In the latter version, this is also the version where it shows a more revealing, erotic bubble dance by Sally Strand. If one slows the part where she lifts her bubble up, one can see much more of her nudity than is shown in the former case. The bubble also immediately comes down after going up a certain distance rather than to the left first before coming down. The short is also in high-quality definition as well in this case.
- As of March of 2008, Mickey Rooney is the only one of the forty-six stars caricatured still living.
