Carnival of Rhythm

This is actually a fairly decent little short subject, and it's not because of the fair choreography, the unmemorable singing or Knox Manning's usual pompous delivery of overwritten lines like 'savage as the night from which it comes'. It's because the unnamed set designer and Technicolor DP Charles P. Boyle agreed on a set that looks like it was designed by German expressionists with a sense of humor, and dressed up in bright but shadow-lit colors, so you get a constant stream of impressionist blotches, like Mondrian on a black canvas. So if you can ignore the sound, this is a great picture, worth a rating of ten .... but the soundtrack brings it down to merely good.

Does anyone but me think Katherine Dunham is a dead ringer for Phylicia Rashad?