#752) Nicholas Brothers Family Home Movies (c. 1934 – c. 1950)

This is another one of my placeholder posts. The “Nicholas Brothers Family Home Movies” are currently unavailable online in their entirety, but a few minutes appear in two different TV specials about the Nicholas Brothers: the 1992 British documentary “The Nicholas Brothers: We Sing and We Dance”,  and the 1999 “Biography” episode “The Nicholas Brothers: Flying High”. Thanks to Ken Scheck for bringing these to my attention.

The Plot: Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Fayard and Harold Nicholas appeared on stage and screen as The Nicholas Brothers, performing their unique “flash dance” combing precision tap with outstanding acrobatics. The first two decades of their careers are chronicled in a series of home movies filmed by the brothers, as well as their parents Ulysses and Viola Nicholas. We get a peek into the Nicholas Brothers’ beginnings at New York’s famous Cotton Club, their trips to Hollywood, their extensive international touring, and personal glimpses of the expanding Nicholas family, including a pre-fame Dorothy Dandridge!

Why It Matters: The NFR calls these home movies “extraordinary” because they “capture a golden age of show business” as well as “document the middle-class African-American life of that era”. We also get an all-encompassing essay from Tony Nicholas (Fayard’s son) and Academy Film Archive expert Luisa F. Ribeiro.

But Does It Really?: I’ve been trying to track down this film for years, and although I’ve only been able to view a few minutes of these home movies, I loved every second of it. While we’ve covered a lot of show business for this blog, very little (if any) behind the scenes footage has been inducted. I get that the NFR doesn’t want to turn too meta, but this backstage glimpse of a bygone showbiz era was quite a treat. My only issue is that I haven’t been able to see all of it yet. A yes for the “Nicholas Brothers Family Home Movies” on the NFR, an encapsulation of time, place, family, and remarkable talent.

Everybody Gets One: Ulysses and Viola Nicholas were both musicians at various vaudeville houses in the 1920s; Ulysses on drums, Viola on piano. Their first son Fayard was born in 1914, followed by daughter Dorothy in 1920 and second son Harold in 1921. Fayard would watch all the acts their parents performed for, learning how to imitate each act’s dancing and singing, teaching all of this to his siblings. The three Nicholas children started performing in 1931 in Philadelphia as “The Nicholas Kids”, though Dorothy left the act shortly thereafter. An offer for the newly renamed “Nicholas Brothers” act with the Cotton Club in 1932 saw the family move to New York, and by 1934 the act was successful enough that the family could afford a state of the art 16 mm camera to record home movies with. While Viola and the children filmed their share of these home movies (Ulysses died in 1935), most of this footage was filmed by Lorenzo Hill, the Nicholas family’s longtime friend and chauffeur.

• I’ll be covering the available footage in as close to chronological order as I can. By 1934, the Nicholas Brothers had been performing at the Cotton Club for two years, with the occasional trip out to Hollywood to film dance routines for such films as “Kid Millions” (also Harold is in “The Emperor Jones”; how did I miss that?) The Cotton Club footage is the only known footage inside the famous nightclub, notorious at the time for its segregation: Black performers for a Whites-only audience (the Nicholas Brothers were the only act allowed to mingle with the audience after a performance). The Nicholas’ Cotton Club footage is primarily taken from the wings, though someone was able to discreetly film a rehearsal from the house. Among the Cotton Club performers making an appearance here is Cab Calloway, whose own home movies have also found their way onto the NFR. Man, Calloway’s got more NFR titles than Christopher Nolan.
• One of my favorite moments was the Nicholas Brothers dancing with Fred Astaire on the RKO backlot. Astaire was filming “Top Hat” at the time, and often praised the brothers’ dancing abilities in interviews, calling them his heroes.
• My main takeaway from this footage is how practically every shot of Fayard and Harold offstage is them mugging for the camera or showing off a new dance move. Even in the interviews conducted for the later documentaries they always seem to be “on”. It makes sense, these two were born into show-business, they know no other life; if there’s a camera, it’s showtime. Hopefully, they were much more reserved when the camera was off.
• Another highlight is the brothers performing on Broadway in the Rodgers and Hart musical “Babes in Arms”. This is that “let’s paint the barn and put on a show” musical that’s been lampooned to death over the decades. “Babes in Arms” was subsequently made into a film with Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland, though the script was completely rewritten, most of the score was thrown out, and…oh God they added a blackface number. Moving on…
• In 1939, the Nicholas Brothers did a South American tour, and there is footage of the brothers performing with Carmen Miranda. I don’t know if this led to them appearing with Miranda in “Down Argentine Way”, but it certainly didn’t hurt.
• Yes, that is a young Dorothy Dandridge in these home movies. Dandridge met Harold while the two were working at the Cotton Club in 1938 (Dorothy was part of the Dandridge Sisters singing trio), and the two were married from 1942 to 1951. Harold admitted years later that he was not the greatest husband to Dandridge, spending more time away from home playing golf, which is also documented in these home movies.
• The last of the footage appears to be from one of the Nicholas Brothers’ many European trips in the late 1940s/early 1950s, most likely their trip to London in 1948 and a royal command performance for King George VI. Was he still Colin Firth in 1948 or had he already become Jared Harris?
• Watching these two documentaries meant getting to revisit the brothers’ incredible work in “Down Argentine Way” (which I called “one of [that] movie’s few saving graces”) and “Stormy Weather” (“the brothers do not disappoint”). I also got to watch their dance numbers in some of their other movies, and is it me or does that “Be a Clown” song from “The Pirate” sound familiar?
• According to the NFR essay there’s a lot of the “Nicholas Brothers Family Home Movies” that I haven’t seen. Highlights include: a family trip to the 1933-1934 Chicago World’s Fair, a tribute to Bill “Bojangles” Robinson at the Cotton Club, Fayard and Harold’s amateur film “Mutiny on Sugar Hill”, a star-studded USO tour in 1939, and Fayard’s stint in the army during WWII.

• After Fayard’s death, his son Tony and daughter-in-law Vanita donated his home movie collection to the Academy Film Archive in Los Angeles. While the “Nicholas Brothers Family Home Movies” have yet to appear online in full, snippets can be found in other documentaries, and the footage has been screened on occasion at the Academy Museum, with Tony Nicholas on hand for at least one screening to provide commentary.