NIGHT IN A DORMITORY is the earliest film we have of Ginger Rogers, surely the only reason it is of any interest today. Ginger was 18 when it was made and this probably gives us a good idea of what she was like on a vaudeville stage. She sings in the little girl Helen Kane/Betty Boop voice that was popular at the time, and is cute as all get out. Strangely, she doesn't dance at all. For that we have Thelma White doing a nice tap number, and a chorus that was somewhat less well rehearsed than Ginger and Fred would be a few years later. Actually, the chorus is nearly as disorganized as the plot, if you would call it a plot. DORMITORY begins with a group of girls singing and dancing their lamentations over the fact of being stuck in their eponymous dorm for the evening. Then one girl sneaks in and tells another one about the hot night she's just spent at a place called 'The Melody Club'. The rest of this musical short consists of flashbacks to various incidents that have happened at the Melody Club. Mostly we get a couple of comedians tossing back and forth lame jokes concerning skipping out on their bill, a song and dance by Thelma White and female chorus, and two songs by Ginger Rogers, one of them backed by a mixed dancing chorus. These songs are decent enough, though in this early talkie the camera is stuck in only one or two positions while filming them. Unfortunately, our chorus is pretty inept, though I thought that the choreographer came up with a few clever moves for them as they bounced up and down a few stairs, the camera cutting to a pretty neat side view of the action a couple of times. But really, the little girl from Fort Worth is notably outclassing everyone around her. She seemed a natural in front of a camera from the very beginning.
Review of A Night in a Dormitory
