Watch The Duke Is Tops For Free

Best movie of this year hands down!

good back-story, and good acting

if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

I liked this for its glimpse into end-of-vaudeville-era black culture.The script is pretty lame and the plot non-existent but the chance to look in on an old-time medicine show was fascinating. (The back-and-forth with the audience rocked!)Surprisingly, I found Lena Horne to be one of the weaker parts of the film. Her voice is mellifluous but her acting and dialog seemed wooden. Ralph Cooper -- who, I learned on Wikipedia, went on to found Amateur Night at Harlem's Apollo Theater -- comes across as far more the natural show person. How 'bout his exuberant conducting of that glitzy club band?Some of the tap-dancing sequences and musical ensembles, particularly Cats and the Fiddle, were thrilling to behold. There's a lot of good stuff in this old chestnut..

Duke Is Tops, The (1938) ** (out of 4) Decent race movie has producer Duke Davis (Ralph Cooper) breaking it off with partner Ethel Andrews (Lena Horne) so that her career will have a chance to take off. He hits the hard times before eventually getting what might be a break by bringing Andrews back to form. If you're familiar with race films then you know they don't feature the style, budgets or talents of those films being released in Hollywood. You also shouldn't go into a Musical like this expecting something like you'd see from MGM. With that out of the way, this is pretty much what you'd expect as we get a straight-forward story without any twists or turns and a predictable ending that you'll see coming from a mile away. There's really nothing overly special here but people will want to check out Horne who made her film debut here. I don't think anyone could watch this and see the talent that would come in future films but at the same time this was her first stab at acting. The screenplay really doesn't do her any justice but she does have that wonderful voice that she gets to show off several times. The songs themselves aren't going to be found on Horne's greatest hits package but they aren't too bad. I thought Cooper was pretty good as well, although, again, the screenplay does his character no justice. While the part wasn't the best written I thought Cooper kept things moving and made his character fun to watch. There's not too much imagination in terms of direction but I'm sure a lot of this could be blamed on the screenplay and the fact that there wouldn't have been much time to shoot this thing. The low budget is very apparent with several dance/musical sequences, which just come off looking very cheap. The numbers aren't overly bad, it's just that they aren't impressive either. Fans of race movies or those wanting to see the 21-year-old Horne might want to check this out but others should stay clear.

This all black film was Lena Horne's screen debut. Made for black audiences, it was re-released after the cross-over success of her two great 1943 films, Cabin in the Sky and Stormy Weather. The Duke Is Tops is a typical film about stage performers, and it is certainly a B movie. Duke Davis (Ralph Cooper) and Ethel Andrews (Horne) are a songwriter/singer team. When Ethel gets bigger offers, Duke can't come with, so he breaks it off hard with her so she'll have no regrets. He travels to the South with an old friend who is selling cure-all elixirs from his wagon; meanwhile, without Duke's behind-the-scenes work, Ethel is a flop in New York. It's all fairly mediocre. Horne would become a much better actress in her later films. Fans of the singer will probably be disappointed anyways, as she is only in the film for about 15 minutes. Cooper is the star. But there are several wonderful musical performances that make the film much more worth watching than it otherwise would have been. For a much better film of the same time, definitely check out Stormy Weather, which is probably the pinnacle of the all-black films of this era. 6/10.

The Duke Is Tops is a black version of the white show business and Broadway movies popular in the 1930's. It has the struggling broke producer, the young performer who becomes a star overnight, and the medicine show to Broadway (or in this case fashionable Harlem nightclub) plot. It is best known as the debut movie of a beautiful, 21-year-old Lena Horne, but its real star is Ralph Cooper, who gets a brief opportunity to show his singing and bandleading abilities, as well as to dance a few steps. Much of the acting is stiff and the film's editing is crude, but it has all the pleasures of an early black musical -- specialty singers, eccentric dancers, and pretty chorus girls in skimpy bikinis -- as well as a more substantial script than many other black movies of its day (or of today, for that matter).