The Coen Brothers’ star-studded old-timey Hollywood farce Hail, Caesar! hits theaters Feb. 5, but if you read that and thought “But I wanna see the apparently closeted character played by Channing Tatum sing and dance now,” well, here you go. In two new clips released this weekend, Tatum does just that.
The first clip, posted above, features Tatum and a crew of sailors singing a song titled “No Dames,” which is a subtle-ish little ditty that seems to be trying to tell us something. Here’s Vanity Fair‘s Joanna Robinson on the history involved.
Tatum’s sequence is a spoof on some of classic Hollywood’s famous dancing-sailor movies like On the Town, Anchors Aweigh, and Follow the Fleet. This “No Dames” song riffs pretty well on Astaire’s “We Saw the Sea” with a hint of South Pacific for good measure. But what this sequence has that all those golden-age-of-Hollywood movies lack is a tongue-in-cheek acknowledgment of the clear homoeroticism pouring off these fit young men in clinging white uniforms.
The second, posted below, features a dance number that gets the same message across… with somewhat less subtlety.
Still, I feel like this dance number is missing something. I can’t quite put my finger on what, exactly, but something. Something funky. Something… something… magic.
Yup, there it is.
