Buddy Bradley’s Legacy of Dance

The case that Ashton and Bradley heavily influenced each other is stronger, if also strained. They collaborated on the stereotype-sodden 1932 ballet “High Yellow”—which, if it was not exactly, as Footer asserts, the first jazz ballet, or the first ballet choreographed by an African American, was the most prominent to date. You don’t need to buy Footer’s proposition that signature characteristics of Ashton’s ballets “derive from his work with Bradley” to see the significance of Ashton and Bradley’s having been peers early on.

“Evergreen,” the 1934 film, features the only known footage of Bradley dancing: about six seconds of him doing the Charleston with some kids on the sidewalk. The cameo is more a stamp of African American authenticity than a behind-the-curtain peek at the creator, but “Evergreen” does demonstrate Bradley’s gifts, particularly through the dancing of his pupil Jessie Matthews. Although Matthews’s eagerness to disguise her humble origins (she was the daughter of a fruit-and-vegetable seller) caused her to adopt absurdly posh diction and a fluttery vibrato, she was a charming dancer whom Bradley made look like a natural.

At the start of the dance break in the number “Dancing on the Ceiling,” Matthews steps with a hitch that rolls through her spine as it bends back deeply, her head releases, and she pushes the air away from her with flexed hands: a soigné, slightly woozy gesture of simultaneous resistance and surrender that’s very nineteen-thirties and which would become her signature move. Here, she embodies Bradley’s ideal of feminine romance, and, elsewhere, of a pert cuteness sometimes accentuated with crisp tapping.

Matthews’s numbers are still worth watching, but Footer gives Matthews’s male counterparts perhaps too much credit. Of the top-hatted musical-comedy star Jack Buchanan, she says that Bradley transformed him from “mechanical puppet to seductive dancer,” turning the drawback of his stiffness into “charming idiosyncrasy.” The slightness of Buchanan’s transformation can be seen in the films choreographed by Bradley, and also two decades later, in contrast with Fred Astaire, as the two men dance side by side in “The Band Wagon,” from 1953.

Speaking of comparisons with Astaire: as Footer piles up the cinematic achievements of her subject—proving that tap could be romantic, that jazz dance could reveal character and tell stories, and that both could be integrated into a book musical—she acknowledges that Astaire was doing the same things at the same time. This is true only in the narrowest sense.

The bit in “Top Hat” (1935) where Astaire inadvertently annoys Ginger Rogers by tapping in the room above hers came after Bradley’s “Dancing on the Ceiling,” but Astaire’s version of the idea is infinitely more sophisticated, both as stand-alone choreography and for the wit of its integration into a whole musical scene. Bradley’s film choreography, even in the numbers that Footer deems masterpieces, is above average, clever and assured, but Astaire’s art—inconceivable without the enormous influence of Bradley’s Black contemporaries, like John Bubbles—is in another league. Footer’s advocacy, in any case, is shot through with special pleading: look how well he did with the bad dancers and low budgets of British films! What he might have done in Hollywood twice came close to being tested. In 1931, he turned down an invitation by the middling white choreographer Seymour Felix to join him in Hollywood, surely a wise decision. There was little chance of a Black behind-the-camera artist advancing in a segregated film industry in which Black dancers served as coaches and dubbed the tapping of white dancers but weren’t credited choreographers. Later, Bradley said, Twentieth Century Fox asked him to choreograph the 1938 film “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” only to replace him because of a scheduling conflict. His replacement was Felix.