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  • Charles Walters: The Director Who Made Hollywood Dance by Brent Phillips
  • Jessica Webb
Charles Walters: The Director Who Made Hollywood Dance. By Brent Phillips. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2014. 368 pp. Softbound $19.95.

In Charles Walters: The Director Who Made Hollywood Dance, Brent Phillips offers a detailed look at the life of dancer and director Charles Walters. Walters directed some of the most memorable and significant movie musicals for MGM Studios, including Easter Parade, High Society, and The Unsinkable Molly Brown. And yet, because he was not labeled auteur, like his contemporaries Vincente Minnelli and Stanley Donen, his contributions to the latter years of the Golden Age of Hollywood (1917–1960s) have been widely ignored. Phillips addresses and corrects this undeserved obscurity with an in-depth examination of Walters's life and profession (ix). He does so with oral histories with Walters himself and those who knew him well; these prove to be the most useful tool in recovering and recreating not only facts about Walters, but also his broader personal context.

Charles Walters is structured chronologically, beginning with Walters's birth in Southern California in 1911 and then following his moves from one location to another during the first two decades of his life—from starting prelaw classes at the University of Southern California (USC) in 1930 to working as part of a cabaret duo with Dorothy Kennedy Fox in 1935—before he became a known entity in the entertainment world. Starting in 1935, Walters broke onto the Broadway stage as a skilled dancer in shows like Jubilee and I Married an Angel. He quickly moved from being a dancer to choreographing dance routines for others as a dance director for a few Broadway shows before he relocated to Hollywood to work with MGM Studios. The majority of Phillips's book focuses on Walters's time at MGM, where he transitioned from a choreographer to a dance director to a full-fledged film director. Phillips spends time on every movie Walters worked on, charting his rise to one of the studio's most profitable directors and then to his decline in the late 1960s. Phillips ends the book by highlighting Walters's beloved final venture—teaching a film style analysis class at USC—before he died in 1982.

In the latter years of his life, Charles Walters gave four lengthy interviews, which Phillips expertly employs throughout his book as the backbone of the narrative. He quotes Walters throughout, offering Walters's insights on nearly [End Page 388] every aspect of his long career. Phillips, however, does not depend on these interviews as his lone source. Charles Walters uses oral histories in every stage of Walters's life—a combination of interviews other historians and journalists recorded and those the author did himself—to fill in the gaps Walters left or to enrich the stories from other perspectives. For example, in the interviews he gave, Walters did not discuss his early days. So Phillips found one of his childhood companions, Elmer Thill, to provide a more complete picture of Walters's youth. By the time Phillips began working on this book, many of Walters's contemporaries had passed away, so the author relied on interviews they gave during their lifetimes. These colleagues include Gene Kelly, Howard Keel, Doris Day, and Walters's dear friend Judy Garland. These oral histories allow the discussion of Walters's career to be more than a simple catalog of facts or a time-line—they offer personal insight on his skills as a dancer, choreographer, and director from those who were part of that career.

Another important contribution oral histories make to Charles Walters is in the treatment of his personal life. Walters, a gay man, avoided discussing that aspect of his life in the interviews he gave. Instead, the oral histories Phillips conducted while researching and writing Charles Walters—like the one with Jimie Morrisey, Walters's partner in the 1950s and 1960s—help to fill in those gaps. Walters lived as a gay man his entire life but not quite openly, because he understood Hollywood's discrimination against those who were not heterosexual. Phillips, using his interviews with Morrissey...

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