The Camera Moves #4

Jazz musician Hazel Scott unexpectedly appears in Vincente Minnelli's second film, I Dood It (1943)—which showed up for an extremely rare screening on celluloid at BAMcinématek's retrospective on the filmmaker, which ends tonight—and in one astounding camera dolly and crane, beginning a three-shot performance, plays an astounding cover of Takin' a Chance and injects the film with much of the warmth, character, play and sexiness missing from the movie's central romcom between Red Skelton and Eleanor Powell.  A friend compared this scene's cinema to that of Straub-Huillet's The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach.

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Special thanks to Jake Perlin for making this screening possible.