Penelope Cruz, playing Daniel Day-Lewis’ mistress, practically gives him a heart attack in Nine, a 2009 film adapted from a Broadway musical that was, in turn, based on Federico Fellini’s classic 8-1/2. It wasn’t a particularly memorable title, but Cruz’s steamy call from the Vatican was certainly a highlight.
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Tall and elegant, Charlotte Greenwood always looked so prim and proper — a model of decorum in her tailored gowns, her hair perfectly coiffed, her diction curt and formal. But the veneer was deceiving. In fact, Greenwood was a skilled comedienne, trained in vaudeville, and able — owing to being double-jointed — to kick up her heels higher than anyone else in Hollywood. As IMDB reports, “Even when well into middle age, she could perform complete leg-splits as well as kick higher than the top of her own head – sideways!” Here, she cuts loose with a young buck, much to the shock of her sanctimonious husband played by Edward Everett Horton, in The Gang’s All Here (1943).
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We’ve featured Chelo Alonso previously (Go! Girl! Go! — Nueve), but she’s such an amazing dancer, and so little remembered these days, that we’re giving her a second look. This time, the Cuban-born beauty plays a fiery Gypsy woman who comes to the aid of Lex Barker in Terror of the Red Mask, a colorful 1960 Italian story — involving tyrants, freedom-fighters and palace intrigue — set during the Renaissance era.
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Allyson Chang Yen goes wild in the 1967 Hong Kong romantic comedy They All Fall in Love, an unsung release from the Shaw Brothers studio. Allyson never achieved leading lady status, which is a shame, because this scene suggests she had the magnetism and glittery presence to handle stardom.
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Gene Tierney plays a South Seas siren who helps soothe the pain of Tyrone Power, an outcast cheated from claiming his birthright by a sadistic uncle, in 1942’s Son of Fury: The Story of Benjamin Blake.
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A parade of dancers from Minotaur, the Wild Beast of Crete, a 1960 film based on the mythical story of a half-bull, half-man who can only be satisfied by virgin sacrifices. Stick with this collage until the end because the last solo dancer is by far the sexiest.
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Helen appears as the sexy cabaret star Loveleena in Agent Vinod, Bollywood’s 1977 answer to James Bond. Born in Burma to an Anglo Indian officer and a Burmese nurse, Helen and her family migrated to India as refugees in 1942 after the Japanese overran Burma during WWII. Famous for playing vamps, Helen starred in more than 350 movies. She retired in 1983 after she married screenwriter Salim Khan, but has returned to the screen in recent years, now cast as a grandmother. Agent Vinod, by the way, was remade earlier this year, emerging as one of Bollywood’s top-grossing films of 2012.
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Dorothy Dandridge kicks up her heels with the flying Nicholas Brothers as a specialty act, accompanied by the Glenn Miller Band, in the 1941 Twentieth Century Fox musical Sun Valley Serenade.
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Cecille B. DeMille made a career out of producing and directing Biblical epics that upheld Christian values while also straddling the borderline by presenting pagan excesses in as flagrant a way as the censors would permit. Witness “The Dance of the Naked Moon” scene from his 1932, Pre-Code Sign of the Cross.
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The curvaceous Daniela Rocca in a campy dance sequence from the 1960 Italian sword and sandal epic Revenge of the Barbarians. Twelve years later, Rocca was judged insane and committed to a mental institution, but she went on to write and publish five books.
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