Black Tights is a 1961 French anthology film featuring four ballet segments shot in Technirama and directed by Terence Young. The dances in the film were abridged versions of ballets created for the stage by the dancer and choreographer Roland Petit, who appears in the three of the four sequences along with his wife, the ballerina Zizi Jeanmarie. The film is also known as Un deux trois quatre! in France.
Plot summary
The four independent stories are performed in the form of ballet, interspersed with introductions by Maurice Chevalier. In two of them, he periodically explains events as the story progresses. La Croqueuse de diamants translates as "The Gold Digger", or more literally as "the diamond cruncher". The story, a romantic comedy, opens in Les Halles. Amid the hubbub of street activity, a group of woman street vendors sing in French about their trade. A furniture delivery man, while delivering a seating bankette to a cafe, encounters a woman pickpocket, who is the leader of a pickpocketing gang, based next door to the cafe. The delivery man and the gold digger fall in love with each other, the latter leaving her criminal gang to go off with her new love. Cyrano de Bergerac is a tragic romantic story, based on a play of the same name. Both Cyrano de Bergerac and Christian de Neuvillette love Roxanne. But the poet Cyrano has a big nose and is too shy to declare his love to Roxanne. Instead, he helps his friend Christian woo Roxanne, writing love letters on his behalf. Deuil en 24 heures translates as "mourning in 24 hours" or more loosely as A Merry Mourning. Along the Champs-Élysées, a wealthy man accompanies his wife on a shopping trip to buy a dress. A strange man flirts with his wife in a cafe. The husband challenges the flirting man to a duel which the husband fatally loses. The wife starts to enjoy her widowhood. The story is a black comedy. Carmen is the tragic story of the soldier Don Joséfalling in love with the Gypsy Carmen. The plot of the ballet roughly follows the story of the opera with some variations in plot detail. The ballet features music by Georges Bizet. In the Lillas Pastia scene, the ballet troupe sings l'amour est enfant de bohème in a half-sung/half-spoken fashion.
Fredbjørn Bjørnsson, Hans von Manen as Les brigands
Regine Rourry, Sally Pierce, France Arnel, Irena Radkitwiecz as Les cigarières''
Reception
Black Tights received the Biennale Special Golden Award at the Venice Film Festival and the European Grand Prix by film critics in Europe. Reviews at the time of release were largely favorable. Writing in the Los Angeles Times, critic Philip K. Scheuer called the film "artistic without being forbiddingly highbrow" said that 'the film "could do as much to popularize French Ballet as West Side did for American." He praised the cinematography as "visually dazzling" and said that the Carmen ballet was "the real show-stopper." New York Daily News critic Wanda Hale awarded the film four stars and called it "a most unusual ballet picture, artistic, beautiful, saucy and naughty." The Boston Globe, while praising Black Tights an "intriguing picture to watch" and "rare entertainment," said that the there are "occasional dull spots which slow up its pace and deaden its magic." The Guardian called the film "threadbare" and "very lightly blessed with talent or imagination." The unsigned review described the dancing as "a mixture of modern wiggling and traditional ballet." New York Times critic Bosley Crowther said that the "over-all effect of the picture, apart from its meaning for those who are stringent ballet students or lovers and have particularly keen eyes for technique, is that of a great big package of dance numbers from a musical film - just that, ballet numbers. For our personal taste, that's too much." He called the Chevalier narration "a little foolish and patronizing."
Legacy
In a 1986 review when the film when shown at a revival house, Philadelphia Inquirer critic Carrie Rickey wrote that "whether seen as a significant chapter in the history of modern dance or as a camp curiosity," the film was a "rare record of Petit's Ballet de Paris." She said that Petit had as much influence on Hollywood musicals, especially An American in Paris, as it did on modern dance. A 1986 New York Times review of the video release of the film noted that Black Tights "had little success upon its release in 1962" but "is now a highly enjoyable record of Mr. Petit's contribution to ballet. And that is his ability to marry popular forms with a poetic realism." Three dancers who appear in the film—Dirk Sanders, Hans van Manen, and Gerard Lemaitre—went on to form the Netherlands Dance Theater.
