Archive for the ‘ Tango In Film ’ Category

2011, April 12 – DVD RELEASE, “RASHEVSKI’S TANGO”

Rosa Rashevski believes that tango can heal the body better than jewish chicken soup; a bold claim considering that scientists and philosophers have mused on the power of jewish chicken soup for generations, nevertheless, she does tell her sons Simon and David to resort to the tango when they’re in need of overcoming their troubles…Rashevski’s Tango is a portrait of three generations of a Jewish family wrestling with issues of identity, love, interfaith marriage and long-held family secrets… the story starts with the death of Rosa, a holocaust survivor who avoided religion and rabbis, so much so that after the holocaust she decided not to circumcise her sons  which is why, upon her death the family is surprised that she had bought a burial site in a Jewish cemetery…her death makes her family engage in individual and collective soul-searching; their relationships to each other shifts in order to fill the empty space left by the formidable Rosa; they also begin to examine their own bond to Judaism…

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Simon and his Christian wife Isabelle fight over whether Simon will be buried in a Jewish cemetery…their daughter Nina wants a Jewish husband, but is falling in love with Antoine, who is not Jewish but at least knows how to tango…Rosa’s grandson Rick is involved with Khadija, a beautiful French Muslim woman, who chides him, “in Palestine you want to kill Arabs, but here you want to marry one”…Rashevski’s Tango was the first feature film for writer director Sam Garbarski …Sam Garbarski was born in Krailling Germany on Februarfy 13, 1948 (Aquarius) but at age 22 he immigrated to Belgium where he settled and acquired citizenship…for more than twenty successful years he led his own advertising agency which produced award winning spots in Cannes, New York and London…the film was a resounding success earning rave reviews from critics across the spectrum…Jewish influence in tango is strong; there were many jewish Argentineans who contributed to the development of tango…two of its greatest Osvaldo Pugliese and Astor Piazzolla were of Italian jewish background

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2011
04/12
CATEGORY
Aquarius
Debuts
Jewish
Sun Sign
Tango In Film
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2006, April 7 – PREMIERE OF “TAKE THE LEAD”

Pierre Dulaine, is a kind of a special person; Antonio Banderas who plays him in “Take The Lead” called him “the invisible man”… in the film when Dulaine’s dance group of unlikely heros is victorious, instead of joining in the celebration, he simply turns around and walks out, hence “the invisible man”…Banderas says of the real Pierre Dulaine, “that’s the way he really is; that’s the way he does everything…his capacity to love and share without expecting anything in return”...the two tenants of his teaching method are “Respect and Compassion” and it is indeed these two elements which in real life led him to volunteer to teach dance to inner city trouble kids to give them hope…out of the effort was born Dancing Classrooms which helps young people to acquire life lessons of self esteem, respect, team work…the program has been duplicated in hundreds of schools throughout the United States…Pierre Dulaine was born in Jaffa, Palestine to a British officer, and a mother who was half French and half Palestinean…

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They later settle in Amman Jordan where he learned to speak French, Arabic and English…in 1956 because of the Suez Crisis, they family had to leave in a hurry and leave everything behind; they settle in Birmingham England…His early days were difficult, he was shy and unsure in an alien evnviornment where his accented english did not help him to get accepted…at the age fourteen he discovered dancing … by his own admission he was not good but he liked it; eventually he went on to win ballroom dancing’s most prestigious awards….today it is part of his teaching philosophy, “if you like dancing you can become a good dancer even if you are not particularly gifted”, he says…eventually he settled in New York where he met his dancing partner Yvonne Marceau..Antonio Banderas was personally inspired by the whole idea and in fact during the rehearsals he would invite the dancers to his house for dinner so that he could get to know them better and he had long conversations with Pierre Dulaine…film critic Tony Medley summarized the film accurately when he said, “it held my interest throughout and passed the watch test with flyng colors”

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2011
04/07
CATEGORY
Debuts
Films
Tango In Film
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2003, March 28 – PREMIERE “ASSASSINATION TANGO”

Tango has a power over the human soul like few things in existence…in “Assassination Tango” it changes a hired killer named “John” which is played by academy award winner Robert Duvall…”John” starts out as a hired cynical killer; when his client trys to tell him why they have ordered the hit on a despicable Argentinean general he essentially says, “Never mind, I don’t really care, I just want to do the job, get paid and get out of here”…but the general’s return to Argentina has been delayed and to pass the time he spends time with a beautiful dancer, “Manuela”, who introduces him to the fascinating world of tango…as he progressively gets into tango, it  begins to begins to change him…tango demonstrates similar transformative power in a another great film, “Scent of a Woman”, (1992) where in an explosive scene, a suicidal blind colonel played by Al Pacino, with a gun in hand, screams to his student assistant, “give me one reason not to”….the boy answers, “you dance tango better than anyone”…somehow this mysteriously snaps him out of his suicidal spiral and he begins the road to recovery…tango has even been found to be the best therapy for Parkinson’s patients

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Robert Duval fell in love with tango when he saw “Tango Argentino” on broadway around 1988…it became an obssessive hobby resulting in over thirty-eight trips to Argentina…in time he became an accomplished tango dancer; he once danced tango for President Clinton and guests at the White House…he had written the script  for Assassination Tango and essentially had left it in a drawer….Frances Ford Coppola, who had also been in the theater that fateful night to see Tango Argentino, urged Duvall to make the film and eventually Coppola produced it and financed it….In “Assassination Tango”, Robert Duvall writes, directs and acts; he stars with the alluring Luciana Pedraza who would become his wife ands is forty years younger than he…however, the critics were merciless, they slaughtered the film and it was a dismal failure at the box office…in its defense, it is entertaining and the tango dancing is  well staged; perhaps the best scene of all is the dance performed by Pablo Veron with Geraldine Riojas during the credits at the end of the film

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2011
03/28
CATEGORY
Films
Male Dancers
Tango In Film
8 comments

1955, March 19 – SATCHMO RECORD, “KISS OF FIRE” (EL CHOCLO)

Lester Allen and Robert Hill were basking in the fame and glory of their new hit “Kiss of Fire”, when someone finally noticed that it was oddly similar to the immortal tango “El Choclo”…in fact after intense proceedings they finally conceded that it was in fact “El Choclo” and thereafter, on all sheet music, the name of “Angel Villoldo” the orignal composer, preceded theirs…Kiss of fire was a major hit for Georgia Gibbs in 1952 reaching all the way to number 2 on the Billboard Charts…another popular version was the one by Louis Armstrong “Satchmo” which was recorded on March 19, 1955…other celebrated versions were by Nat King Cole, Connie Francis and in Finland, by the “King of Finnish Tango”, Olavi Virta…seeking to capitalize on the immense popularity of  “Kiss of Fire” a film, directed by Joseph M. Newman and starring Jack Palance, was released in 1955…part of the background music is a flamenco like version of “Kiss of Fire”…

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Angel Villoldo, the original composer of “Kiss of Fire” (El Choclo) was a fascinating man, a sort of Ernest Hemingway and Bob Dylan all in one…he was born on February 16, 1861 into a destitute family in the neighborhood of Barracas, Buenos Aires…he quit school early to work and did many jobs including teamster, herdsman and circus clown before devoting himself to music…..he would become a prolific composer and lyricist of some of the most beloved tangos in history…”El Choclo” became instantly popular all over the world and the story is told that German officers wishing to honor a visiting Argentinean dignitary mistakenly played “El Choclo” believing it to be the national anthem…when it first premiered in the exclusive “El Americano” restaurant in Buenos Aires, the leader of the orchestra had to disguise it by calling it “Danza Criolla” as tango was considered music of the pimps and prostitutes

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2011
03/19
CATEGORY
Aquarius
Composers
Films
Poet
Recordings
Tango In Film
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1914, March 9 – PREMIERE OF “TANGO TANGLES”

By now tango madness  had swept the world over, it was all the rage in Paris, Berlin, London and so when director Mack Sennet read in the newspaper about an upcoming tango contest, he had a flash…he would send his film crew to the dance hall and improvise one of his famous “shorts”…in fact the whole of “Tango Tangles” is only twelve minutes long…”shorts” were low-budget, fast directed, improvised films which the viewing public at the turn of the century learned to love…actual tango dancing in Tango Tangles appears only briefly in the opening scene where a couple is dancing what appears to be a parody of a tango which metamorphosis into a ballet style movement…Charlie Chaplain plays an inebriated dandy who shows up at the “Dark Town Strutter Ball”, a  masked affair, makes a pass at the hat-check girl played by Sadie Lamp….

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Her favors however are being sought by two other characters, the orchestra leader played by Ford Sterling and the clarinetist Roscoe Arbuckle, all legends of the silent movie era…there is of course the requisite slapstick, with the long punches and the inadvertent falls, a genre created by director Mack Sennet which would lead to stellar success for his Keystone Studios; it was he who discovered Chaplain about whom George Bernard Shaw would say, “he was the only genius to come out of the movie industry”…Chaplain’s role was one of the few where he did not appear as his signature “tramp and mustache” character…Mack Sennet, Canadian born actor, comedian, musician and director, would produce more than 1000 silent films in his 25 year career …his short “Wrestling Swordfish” won an academy award in 1932…..in the final scene of Tango Tangles, Ford Sterling and Charlie Chaplain have punched each other out and are lying on the floor exhausted and Sterling finally says, “I don’t want her, you can have her”

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2011
03/09
CATEGORY
Debuts
Tango In Film
21 comments

1921, March 6 – Premiere “Four Horsemen and The Apocalypse”

Julio is beguiled by the seductive girl dancing the tango…with a confident, menacing stare he strides to the center of the dance floor, with gaucho whip in hand and asks the man let him cut in….in a cavalier manner the man simply ignores Julio and continues to dance with the girl…Julio is enraged and shoves the man brusquely away from the girl…the man takes his knife out and lunges at him but Julio adeptly evades the knife and hits the man on the head with the handle of his whip.. the man falls down and Julio takes over the girl to finish with a spectacular tango dance to the enthusiastic applause of the audience...it is precisely this scene from “Four Horsemen and the Apocalypse” which launched the tango craze throughout the world…based on Vasco Ibanez’s classic novel, several studios had tried unsuccessfully to adapt the novel but it was writer June Mathis who finally succeeded…it was she who hired Rodolfo Valentino, an obscure B film struggling actor who had worked as a taxi dancer…the tango scene in fact was not part of the original story but Mathis included to take advantage of Valentino’s dancing skills…

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It premiered to great acclaim and had a huge cultural impact; it became the top grossing film of 1921 and the first ever to earn one million dollars at the box office…it turned Rodolfo Valentino into a superstar and launched the tango craze; June Mathis would become one of the first powerful women executives in Hollywood…Valentino was born in Castellaneta, Puglia to an Italian father and a French mother…he spent some idle time in Paris and finally returned to Puglia but unable to get a job he left for the United States and arriving there on December 23, 1913…he ran out of money and for a while he lived on the streets of New York…he eventually moved to Los Angeles where he taught dancing to older high society women…on August 15, 1926 he collapsed at the Hotel Ambassador in New York; he was operated on, for a ruptured appendix; surgery had gone well and a recovery was expected…however, he unexpectedly developed pleuritis in his left lung and fell into a coma..he passed away on August 23, 1926; he was 31 years old…interestingly, the film inspired a young Betty Davis to try acting; in 1999, the American Film Institute rated Davis as number two on the list of the “Greatest Female Stars of All Time”

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2011
03/06
CATEGORY
Dancers
Debuts
Films
Male Dancers
Tango In Film
17 comments

1923, February 18 – VALENTINO DANCES AT TRIANON BALLROOM

By the 1920s several dance crazes had swept American, non more than tango….but politically powerful anti vice forces also criticized dance halls and in particular tango  as unhealthy, immoral venues for the seduction of women and the practice of prostitution…hoping to capitalize, Andrew Karzas, invested one million dollars into the construction and promotion of a new dance hall on the South side of Chicago, “The Trianon Ballroom”…the interior was designed to accommodate enormous crowds of up to 3ooo dancer in the main hall and another 3000 in the upper floor…to protect his investment against the moral reformists, Karzas instigated strict rules of conduct which were enforced by six men and women who would evict offenders…a prominent sign read, “we do not allow spooning or petting between the dances” …it is in this atmosphere that Karzas took the courageous act of booking living legend Rodolfo Valentino.

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Valentino danced with his second wife Natacha Rambova to the delight of six thousand delirious fans some of which, it is said, actually fainted…  Natacha Rambova was a costume designer and art director when he met her on the set of the film “Uncharted Seas” in 1921…he married her in Mexicali Mexico but as soon as he returned to California, he was arrested for bigamy as California law required a one year waiting period between marriages…Natacha was a disaster; she was controlling and unsocial causing him many problems personally and professionally; two years later they had a bitter divorce…at the news of  Valentino’s sudden death, 2000 people crammed into the Trianon Ballroom to hear a eulogy from Judge Francis Borelli, president of the Valentino Memorial Association who said of Rodolfo, “he was ever the personification of romance, he was the ideal of love at once Cyrano, Romeo and Don Juan”

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2011
02/18
CATEGORY
Male Dancers
Special Events
Tango In Film
7 comments

1943, February 11 – Beron Records “ME LLAMAN EL ZORRO”

This was another great hit for singer Raul Beron who in the eyes of some cognoscenti, was the greatest orchestra singer of all time…the lyrics are the boasting of a young man, born in La Boca, who is a dashing and debonair rogue who thrives on adversity and loves his life of adventure...”I am a tanguero from the old school and I carry tango in my soul…they call me Zorro”, he says…lyricist Roberto Lambertucci was inspired by the legend of Zorro which was created by New York pulp writer Johnston McCulley in 1919 and which has inspired books, films and other media…it in turn may have been inspired by the real life character Joaquim Carillo Murrieta who was a legendary figure in California during the gold rush who became a robin hood type hero to Mexicans battling racism and discrimination…a reward was offered by the California legislature to capture and kill Murrieta…when he was finally apprehended and executed without due process, his head was severed and placed in a jar of  alcohol as proof of his death to collect the reward

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The severed head in a jar toured California and could be seen for the price of one dollar…among Zorro’s many manifestations is the 1925 film “Don Q Son of Zorro” starring Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Astor in which Zorro dances a Valentino style tango..in the 1998 film “The Mark of Zorro” starring Antonio Banderas and Catherine Zeta-Jones, there is a scene in which Catherine Zeta-Jones dances a passionate dance which is a hodge podge of tango and passo doble…Raul Beron, born March 30, 1920 (Aries) in the town of Zarate, Argentina, began performing in duet with his brother Jose in the local cafes and bars for spare change…it was during one of his non remunerated performances on radio, that orchestra leader Miguel Calò heard him and invited him for an audition; he hire him immediately…his first recording with Calo on April 29, 1942, “Al Compas Del Corazon”, became an instant  great hit and launched Raul on the road to legendary status.

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  • CLICK HERE – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rckflM7IV6k to hear Raul Beron sing his hit “Me Llaman El Zorro” with the Lucio Demare orchestra…music is by Mario Perini and lyrics by Roberto Lambertucci
2011
02/11
CATEGORY
Aries
Composers
Films
Orchestras
Poet
Recordings
Tango In Film
1 comment

1929, January 30 – PREMIERE OF “PANDORA’S BOX”

“She was the most seductive, sexual image of woman ever permitted in celluloid…she is the only pure pleasure seeker I think I ever met” these were the comments of director Richard Leacock regarding actress Louis Brooks…she created a scandal dancing a tango with lesbian “Countess Augusta Geschweitz” in G. W.Pabst’s classic “Pandora’s Box”...Louise portrays “Lulu” a seductive, erotic, thoughtless young woman whose raw sexuality and uninhibited nature bring ruin to herself and those who love her…in this film she is the mistress of a well-respected newspaper publisher whom she marrys..she accidently kills him and is sentenced to five years in prison…she escapes with Alwa, her husband’s son but she is eventually sold to a brothel in Egypt…they eventually escape to London where they are living in squalor and where she prostitutes herself to make ends meet…she selects a client who is non other than Jack the Ripper… in the last scene, Alwa decides to leave her and is seen following a Salvation Army parade unawares of Lulu’s horrible fate up stairs…Jack the Ripper glances at him as he goes by

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In real life Louis Brooks was “Lulu”, living a libertine life of excessive drinking, opulent rich life style, reckless spending, sexual liberation and experimentation including a lesbian affair with Greta Garbo…at the age of nine she had been sexually abused by a neighbor which began her intense relationship to sexuality…in an interview she states “I was a terrible actress, in the film I was simply playing myself which is the hardest thing in the world to do”…her lovers included Charley Chaplain, CBS president William Paley and many others…by the age of 32 she was forgotten; she had had several opportunities to revive her career but she hated hollywood and told them to go to hell…alone and alcoholic, she took a job as a sales clerk in a New York department store where no one suspected she was the former beauty queen and screen myth…later she worked for a call girl agency catering to rich clientele…she never had any children describing herself, in typical  self deprecating humor as “Baren Brooks”

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2011
01/30
CATEGORY
Debuts
Films
Tango In Film
1 comment

2009 January 18 – PREMIERE “ANOTHER CINDERELLA STORY”

“Wow! There is some real electricity in here” was director Damon Santostefano’s thought when he had actress Selena Gomez and actor Drew Seeley read for this romantic comedy “there was immediate Rodolfo Valentino type chemistry which, by the way, hardly ever happens; I got chills down my spin”…in fact the critics were surprised by the overall quality of the film which was expected to be just another teenage bubblegum offering…according to one reviewer the best part of the film was the tango scene they danced together, “offset with some sexy steam-filled tango” she said…noted critic Amber Wilkinson of “Eye For Film” gave the film 4 out of 5 stars…Another Cinderella Story is the classic Cinderella story but set in a modern world where the glass slipper is substituted by an Ipod…the sound track reached number eight on the billboard charts…it ranked number one for cable films that month and reached 5.3 million homes across all key demos.

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Actress Selena Gomez was discovered in Dallas, Texas in a nationwide search when she was 12 years old by the Disney Channel; it was at this age that she started wearing a “purity ring” which is a promise to remain chaste until marriage…her career has exploded into movies, pop star recordings, her own production company, her own fashion line…in August 2009, a 17-year-old Selena became the youngest UNICEF  ambassador ever…in her first official field mission, Selena traveled to Ghana for a week to witness first-hand the stark conditions of vulnerable children that lack vital necessities including clean water, nourishment, education and healthcare….the choreographer was Michelle Johnson who worked with Rob Marshall in the academy award-winning “Chicago“…Damon Santostefano who directed the critically acclaimed “Last Man Running”, has directed off broadway stage productions and was a stand up comedian in his hometown of Boston

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2011
01/18
CATEGORY
Films
Tango In Film
2 comments

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