Dean Collins

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Dean "follows" Guy Madison in preparation for the 1946 film "Till the End of Time," Drama about former WW2 soldiers readjusting to civilian life and dealing with their mental and physical traumas. There is at least one more publicity still showing Dean and Guy on the set. Think I found this one on Pinterest.
upload_2017-7-26_15-28-56.png
 
Watch closely at 52 seconds just to the right of the car on the left of the frame.
Press the gear looking icon on the lower right and go to speed = 0.25.


Dean is wearing a hat, and Jewel is wearing white heels.
You can see this same couple at 0:22. There you can see Dean and Jewel more clearly.

Is Dean channeling someone doing Argentine Tango?
Is Jewel doing boleos?
 
Steve Pastor said:
Watch closely at 52 seconds just to the right of the car on the left of the frame.
Press the gear looking icon on the lower right and go to speed = 0.25.


Dean is wearing a hat, and Jewel is wearing white heels.
You can see this same couple at 0:22. There you can see Dean and Jewel more clearly.

Is Dean channeling someone doing Argentine Tango?
Is Jewel doing boleos?
Click to expand...

Fab clip !!.. takes me back to when....
 
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A "cat" throws his "chick" over the elbow. Dean Collins and Bertie Patters, who won the New York championship in Madison Square Garden, are shown in a contortion of their original "Times Square Rug Cutting Blues." They want the title at a giant swingfest to be held at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. Photo dated: 1939. Herald-Examiner Collection

http://photos.lapl.org/carlweb/jsp/DoSearch?index=z&databaseID=968&terms=0000030044

The lead of this came from an excellent site in Lithuania! http://www.balboa.lt/photos/historical-dance-photos/

I've never seen this photo of Dean (the shoes look familiar! and with a mustache!) Surely, the Herald Examiner has it right?
 
Dean and Jewell McGowan appeared on stage in Medford, Oregon in 1939, a few months after that pciture above was taken. Crater Lake National Park is nearby and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, which is even closer (much!), was four years old.

Someone identified as oldlake found that one.
 
Although Dean was born in Cleveland, Ohio, his family soon mover to Newark, NJ where is grew up. If you want to get an idea what Newark was like when he was there, look at Phillip Roth's "The Plot Against America." This came to my attention because there is now an HBO? series based on the book.
Up until the moment that Lindbergh decides to run for president, I think the book is close to factual. I went to GoogleEarth to plot the streets and neighborhoods in which Roth sets the story. Good way to learn about where Dean came from, although no dance stuff.
 
Steve Pastor said:
Watch closely at 52 seconds just to the right of the car on the left of the frame.
Press the gear looking icon on the lower right and go to speed = 0.25.


Dean is wearing a hat, and Jewel is wearing white heels.
You can see this same couple at 0:22. There you can see Dean and Jewel more clearly.

Is Dean channeling someone doing Argentine Tango?
Is Jewel doing boleos?
Click to expand...

I'm relatively confident that Dean and Jewel aren't the hat and white heels couple at 0:22. Watching it several times on slow-mo, the follower's movements seem more like Irene Thomas (although I doubt that's her as well).

For a slightly higher quality version of the clip, watch here: . In this clip's timecodes, you can see that same hat and white heels couple at 0:12, and especially there it doesn't seem like Dean and Jewel.

Fun Facts: Dean called the running in a circle into a leg lock move at 2:09 "The Fly". And then the second aerial they do (the caveman one) is called "The Jungle". I learned the terms from dancers who learned from Dean himself in the early 80s.
 
BTW, there was a link to a (half-hour!) supercut of Dean Collins' movie appearances posted to Reddit about a week ago:
 
Steve Pastor said:
It's "official" now. Dean and Jewel first appeared on film in the Soundie, "Hold That Tiger," not Dean in "Let's Make Music," or Jewel in "Pot o Gold," which were filmed months later, and with Dean and Jewel each dancing with other partners.

It's fair to note, though, that their 10 seconds on screen in "Hold That Tiger" as 2 of the Six Jitterbugs, were in a 3 minute Soundie, not a "full length" film.
Click to expand...

I've read on a handful of sites that Dean's first break was being asked to choreograph "Let's Make Music" in 1939. Are you sure he did "Hold That Tiger" with Jewel before "Let's Make Music"?

From the world Swing Dance Council website (worldsdc.com)

"Dean’s first big break came in 1939 when he was asked to choreograph sequences in “Let’s Make Music”. He went on to choreographed dozens more and danced in over thirty Hollywood movies, including “Hellzapoppin'” (1941), “Dance Hall” (1941)..."

The thing that confuses me, though, is that Let's Make Music was released 1/17/1941 according to IMDB, while "Hold That Tiger" was released 8/10/1940. So does that mean it took a couple of years to release "Let's Make Music" after Dean danced in the film?

Here's the order of releases I currently have track of:

Let's Make Music (just Dean)1/17/1941 (filmed 1939?)
Hold That Tiger8/10/1940
Melody and Moonlight (just Jewel)10/11/1940
Buck Privates1/31/1941
Pot o' Gold (just Jewel)4/3/1941

Anyone have ideas on whether this is the order they danced in them?
 
It's pretty clear that Dean and Jewel are on screen very briefly in Hold That Tiger so maybe Dean didn't think of it as a "big break." He may have even forgotten about. He wouldn't be the first dancer to say that he never saw himself in a film. And he passed away before the big revival and the arrival of YouTube where all sorts of stuff shows up. In Let's Make Music he and his partner, who is mis identified in nearly all on line sources, if you can believe various contemporaneous accounts and, say, AFI, have the floor to themselves for the entire length of the song.

Take a look at Hilo Hattie copyrighted in 1941.

I wonder if Dean would have done so well if it hadn't been for Jewel. She had press that Dean didn't in those early years.
 
That makes sense about the big break. The one bit that still doesn't quite fit is that most sites mention that Dean choreographed "Let's Make Music" in 1939, which would predate Hold That Tiger (unless that one was also filmed a year or two before it's release). According to Kiku Loomis in "The Dean of Swing" (found on Dean Collin's page on Wikipedia):

"His career began when he was hired by RKO pictures to choreograph the dancing in Let's Make Music, a movie filmed in 1939 and released in 1940..."

Steve, do you happen to have a source claiming Hold That Tiger was Dean's first film?


Regarding Dean's success potentially being dependent on Jewel: a lot of contemporary dancers claim that Jewel was the far more dance-mechanically interesting person. Dean having came from the East Coast was among various Lindy Hoppers that must have had somewhat similar inspirations, but Jewel likely danced what they simply called "swing dancing" out in LA, which is what original dancers Maxie Dorf, Willie Desatoff, and Hal Takier did.

It's likely that Dean took Jewel's rotational "swing" mechanics and danced in a manner that accentuated them as much as possible, thus leading to his "whip" as his default swing out, and the leading the common "switches", where the follow does the twisting step in a circle orbiting the leader.


On a separate note, I'm actually having trouble finding out the exact dates the soundies "Hilo Hattie" and "Jazzy Joe" were made. I know they were both 1941, but I have exactly release dates on the rest of the Dean & Jewel clips, but not these two. Anyone have any idea which month those two were released?


I also bought "In the Navy" a few days ago and I uploaded a more high-definition version onto YouTube of the Andrews Sister's number, complete with those snippets of Dean & Jewel. Here's a link to it:
At 2:32, is Dean dancing with another follower on the left side? She's got lighter hair than Jewel and is wearing a solid-colored short-sleeve dress, as circled here: Can anyone confirm?
 
If you look at the discussion page for the Dean wiki article, you will see that I contacted Kiki years ago. As I remember it, she wrote that the article was a rather casua thing. ALso note that she passed along an incorrect birth name for Dean. OTOH, Dean told the same big break story to Joe Lanza (Black Sheep, Uncle Joe in his posts here.) as related in one of his books.
THe machines that played Soundies used reels of film that had multiple shorts. They were reviewed by BIllboard as "Movie Machine Reviews." One one with Jazzy Joe was copyrighted over a year before it was reviewed. Books on Soundies use the realease dates, and filming didn't seem important enough to make publications like Variety, as far as I've found.
I have multiple sources that say Tiger was on Soundies first release August 1940. At least two are Primary sources - good enough for me.
 
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