The Never Visible Black Dancer

John Nolte over at Big Hollywood demands that you watch this film clip from an obscure 20th Century Fox musical gem called Down Argentina Way.  The clip below features The Nicholas Brothers, a dance duo that stayed small because of guess what?  If you said racism, you are only partly right.

  Head on over there because it's a great site and this is a hell of a feature......and not because it's Black History Month but check out this this deleted clip from nobody knows where; it's the Bill Bojangles Robinson "Step Dance" which I guess is the Genesis of Robinson's famous scene with Shirley Temple later on in The Little Colonel (which you better check out or I'll kill you).  People who worked on this movie said that Temple did her own stuff and Robinson spent only ten minutes with her.  BTW many Blacks just assume Robinson was a better tap dancer than Fred Astaire and was frozen out because of his color.  Not so, as you will note from many Robinson film clips.  Robinson was on the fat side and Astaire was not only thin and presented great angles for the camera, he sang AND looked better in a tux than any man on the face of the earth.   If you were designing the perfect looking dancer for the screen you'd select Astaire hands down.  Then there was his singing.  His phrasing was positively Sinatra before there was a Sinatra.  The song writers of the day, Gershwin etc., demanded that he sing their songs and refused to write if Astaire didn't get the assignments.