Applied Mathematics- Are You With It? 1948 - Lew Parker, Louis Da Pron, and, Donald O'Connor

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Donald O'Connor is underappreciated. Nowadays when you mention Donald O'Connor you have to add on: "You know, the guy who flips off the wall in Singing in the Rain?" before anyone knows who you are talking about.



While "Make em Laugh" is a brilliant dance from a brilliant movie, I figured I would start us on the O'Connor train with a less well-known film. 

Donald O'Connor was a pretty big star in his time. He was the leading man in quite a few hit movie-musicals (including one opposite Marilyn Monroe)


plus the Francis the Talking Mule movies. For those of you unfamiliar, they were a series of movies about a guy and his... talking mule. Pretty self-explanatory. They were a really big thing at the time, so much so that when Donald O'Connor finally quit, they dragged in Mickey Rooney to do the last film!

Trivia: Mr. Ed was based heavily on Francis the Talking Mule

Really Obscure Trivia: Leonard Nimoy (Known best as Mr. Spock on Star Trek) has a tiny part in one of the Francis films.

ANYWAY

SOME BACKGROUND:

Donald O'Connor grew up on Vaudeville. His family put him into their Vaudeville act when he was still a baby as the unbreakable child that got thrown around the stage and dropped off of things.


 Trivia: As a child on Vaudeville, he met and befriended Francis Gum, later to be known as Judy Garland.


His childhood big break was a film with Bing Crosby. They worked well together and did several films later on when Donald had grown up.
As a teenager he was cast with a group of kids called by the studio; "The Jivin' Jacks and Jills" opposite the exquisite Peggy Ryan. They were kind of the B-movie version of Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney.

During the U.S. involvement in World War Two the O'Connor/Ryan duo was frequently used for army propaganda type films. O'Connor worked in film until he himself went to fight. He supposedly came back from the war as something of an alcoholic but he picked right back up where he had left off and continued making B films until he was eventually bumped up into more A list star status.

I believe this is from when he hosted the Oscars

What I find so incredibly impressive about him is that he had no formal dance training.
He learned on Vaudeville from the people around him. Even when he began doing films, he was taught everything by his choreographers.

He often talked about not knowing what to do with his arms when he danced. This dance from 1948's Are You With It? kind of highlights that. I call it the "Baby-O'Connor-noodle-arm-effect."


Watch the dance, you will see what I mean.



Are You With It started as a broadway show and was rewritten and warped into a film that had little in common with the original play. They held over Lew Parker from the Broadway cast to keep his stage style comedic role.
The bartender in the scene is actually the film's wonderful choreographer, Louis Da Pron.

Here you go:

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