By Ray Funk
FORGOTTEN today, Rita Christiani was a distinguished Trinidadian actor and dancer who appeared in a series of Hollywood films in the 1940s. She was born in Port of Spain on December 22, 1917, came to the US at a young age and grew up in Harlem, New York City. As a young woman, she appeared in a series of productions with the Federal Theatre Project, a federal government project to put out of work actors and theatre professionals to work during the height of the Great Depression.
The first was at the Lafayette Playhouse in Harlem in 1937 a play called Sweet Land looking at the lives of sharecroppers and tenant farmers and who were starting to unionise and organise. Later that year, she was a tight rope walker and a clown in a children’s play called Horse Play and in 1939, she appeared in a production of Pinocchio. But she is primarily noted as a dancer.
In 1940, she was featured in a concert at the Manhattan Center doing “new folk dances” performed to spirituals sung by a well-known Negro baritone.” She was described as having performed at the Cuban village at the World’s Fair. During this period, she joined the Katherine Dunham dance company by February 1940 where she quickly become a leading dancer as the troupe travelled across America in a national tour. The tour ended in Los Angeles for a series of shows that appears to have brought Christiani to the attention of the film industry.
[caption id="attachment_1150581" align="alignnone" width="579"] Rita Christiani in Road to Monaco. -[/caption]
Over the next few years, amazingly she appears in seven feature films with casts of many of the biggest acting stars of the time from Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, Rita Hayworth, Ginger Rogers, Henry Fonda, Tyrone Power, Anthony Quinn, Errol Flynn, Betty Davis, Humphrey Bogart and Maureen O’Hara.
In 1942, she appears in three films. In the anthology film Tales of Manhattan, she appears only momentarily getting a hug from Paul Robson when money rains down on a rural village. But she is centre screen in dance performances in the other two. In a swashbuckling pirate film, The Black Swan, she dances with a number of drummers in brief dance sequence set in the coastal city of Maracaibo, Venezuela in 1697.
In Road to Morocco, she literally leaps onto centre stage to perform a dance.
This scene is her most memorable one in Hollywood. A review in the People’s Voice noted:
[T]he language she speaks with her feet is universal. It is aided by a flashing pair of eyes and highly educated hips...Her accompaniment is a wild rhythmic beat…As a finale, two sword throwers throw flashing blades back and forth in front of her and behind her leaping, writhing form. The effect is so terrific that her audience, including Bing Crosby and Bob Hope grow bug-eyed as they watch.
In 1943, Christiani performed in four films, most are very short sequences. In the benefit film for relief during the war, Thank Your Lucky Stars she appears briefly on camera as support for singer Hattie McDaniel’s song Ice Cold Katie where she appea
