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La Revue Des Revues on DVD

St. Louis-born and Harlem-raised Paris music hall superstar Josephine Baker (Zou Zou, Princess Tam Tam), the highest paid entertainer of her day, is only one of the legends in this vintage 1927 collection of sexy and tres risque Le Jazz Hot performances from the notorious nightclubs of Montmarte. Serge Bromberg and Lobster Films spent ten years combing film archives worldwide, with the biggest assist coming from a print located at the Danish Film Institute, to reassemble La Revue Des Revues (whose lavish production numbers are color tinted using an elaborate stencil process) into a cinematic time machine recreating Jazz Age France in all it's extravagance and sensuality. Gabrielle (Helene Hallier), an ambitious but innocent would-be young chorine, trumps a music hall publicity stunt to become the new Parisian nightclub Cinderella. But this lighter-than-champagne-bubbles story is only a pretext for La Revue Des Revues's white-hot, non-stop procession of outrageously and scantily attired exotic dancers, showgirls, and acrobats including the Tiller's Follies Girls, Ruth Zackey and the Hoffmann Girls, and danseuse russe Lila Nikolska. But it's Josephine Baker, "the high priestess of primitivism" (J. Hoverman - Village Voice), who triumphs in two show stopping numbers in which "her clownish backfield-in-motion Charleston shimmy is unlike anything else in the movie and perhaps unlike anything anyone ever did".