Walter Kent

An Air Force captain teaches pilots to fly jets but doesn't like it.

Director Robert Dornhelm casts Bud Cort for alter-ego purposes in She Dances Alone. Cort plays a documentary director, seeking to produce a film on the life of controversial ballet star Vaslav Nijinsky. He finds his goal of objectivity blocked by Nijinsky's elderly real-life daughter Kyra, who is as stocky as her father was sylph-like. Kyra's uncompromising insistence on total control over the project literally shapes (and frequently distorts) the film before our eyes. Adding to the Pirandellian atmosphere of the Australian-produced She Dances Alone is Max Von Sydow, also playing "himself."

Broadway producer Earl Carroll was a Ziegfeld-like entrepreneur who staged lavish revues featuring attractive young ladies. Carroll's annual "Vanities" provided story material for three Hollywood films: Murder at the Vanities (34), A Night at Earl Carroll's (40) and Earl Carroll Vanities (45). This last film was produced by Republic Pictures, a bread-and-butter studio specializing in Westerns and serials; Republic had made musicals before, but few of them were expensive enough to allow for lavish production numbers. Earl Carroll Vanities is likewise rather threadbare, though some of the individual musical highlights aren't bad. The plot, such as it is, concerns financially strapped nightclub owner Eve Arden, who finagles Earl Carroll into staging one of his revues at her club.