Too Marvelous

Here's another musical clip from my video vaults. "Too Marvelous For Words" is the final musical sequence from Ready Willing and Able (1937; dir. Ray Enright) starring Ruby Keeler and Lee Dixon. The film itself is not that interesting, but this musical sequence--which earned choreographer Bobby Connolly an Oscar nomination for Best Dance Direction--is fantastic.

One of the things I find most interesting about this sequence is the attempt to create a sexualized fusion of the female human body with a mechanical apparatus. This is a recurring motif in many musical numbers from the 1930s. This number is also all about the way romantic communication tends to end up being mediated by technology (the telephone and the typewriter), making this strangely relevant to our own era. I think it would be much tougher to make a good musical number about instant messaging or twitter feeds, but someone ought to give it a go.

The song "Too Marvelous For Words," written by Richard Whiting (music) and Johnny Mercer (words), went on to become a standard performed by Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, and countless others.