The Duke Is Tops

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).