Let's Dance (1936) User Reviews (5)

Dancing short is narrated by Pete Smith...

[Doylenf · 5/10 · 29 April 2008]

This is a rather routine Pete Smith specialty short wherein choreographer DAVE GOULD demonstrates, with a partner, various dances including tap, ballroom, something he calls "tap-a-long", and finally acrobatic dancing which leads to the film's liveliest segment on "dancing with cutlery".

Various dancers are expert at throwing knives at each other and skillfully missing with great accuracy while performing a Russian number.

This seemed to be a below par demonstration of the art of dancing, only showing some originality when it gets to the knife throwing prowess of some experts. Otherwise, it's a yawner.

All kinds of fancy steps

[bkoganbing · 5/10 · 21 March 2016]

In this Pete Smith short subject MGM gets to pay tribute to its dance director Dave Gould. Smith's familiar narration together with some dance steps demonstrated by some of the hundreds employed at MGM as dancers take up most of the show.

Back in the Thirties when even the Poverty Row B picture studios were churning out musicals regularly the Academy had a category called Dance Direction for the choreographers. Busby Berkeley probably should have won them all, but Gould did take home a couple.

Capping it all is an intricately choreographed Russian dance number using knives. Worth seeing the short for that alone.

Broadway Rhythm's Got Him

[boblipton · 5/10 · 1 June 2019]

A Smith called Pete narrates this short in which Dave Gould and some assistants demonstrate some dance steps. They use a high-speed camera to show the details of the step. Pete Smith sings -- poorly, of course - a couple of bars, and director David Miller shows some high-brow dances, like an adagio.

Mr. Gould is credited as the inventor of the Continental and the Carioca for the Astaire & Rogers movies. He spent the better part of a decade as a dance director at MGM, and later as a director of soundies - music video precursors that in the 1940s, you could play at a bar for a small charge, like a jukebox but with pictures. Gould had been born in Budapest. He died in 1969 in Los Angeles.

Pete Smith short

[Michael_Elliott · 3 August 2009]

Let's Dance (1936)

** (out of 4)

MGM short has Pete Smith narrating the action as we get to learn how to do a few dances. Dave Gould, a famous choreographer of the era, explains how to do various dances including ballroom, tap, two-time, acrobatic and a few others. Gould is probably best remembered for films such as THE GAY Divorcée and Broadway MELODY OF 1936 and it's doubtful he'll gain any new fans based solely on this short. The biggest problem is that the "documentary" never teaches us anything and in fact, it comes off as being rather dumb. Smith's narration is pretty good even though he hasn't yet become that Pete Smith we all know and love. The dance sequences really aren't anything special as we only see them briefly and don't learn anything about them. The final joke with the overweight women trying to dance themselves skinny might offend some.

On the cutting edge . . .

[pixrox1 · 6/10 · 26 December 2013]

. . . of the latest thing in dance, this eight-minute short is obsessed with dancers throwing knives at stationary women, anchored men tossing daggers at dancing chicks, and twirling guys whipping swords at whirling dolls. It's like buying a ticket for the ballet, and having a knife fight break out. Narrator Pete Smith is his usual snide self, coming up with an unarmed closing that puts his inherent misogyny on full display. Namely, "Business Women's Dancing School" features a half dozen porcine females being led in their minimal movement by an even more rotund dance Instructress. The highlight of this entire exercise (if there is one) consists of a quartet (uncredited here on this site, but I think Pete called them the Adagio Dancers) in which three guys swing and toss a petite lass back and forth amongst themselves. The woman involved is just wearing nude-colored lingerie, so the effect on this black-and-white screen is sort of Garden of Eden-Ish. Didn't shorts need to be submitted to the American Censorship Office in the 1930s?