Cab Calloway Movies

The top brass at a radio station believe their popular new star singer is paying more attention to his love life than to his career.

Abandoned by his father, he was a reform school kid with nothing going for him and a giant chip on his shoulder. He joined the Marines but never stayed far from trouble. Then he discovered acting — and the woman who would be with him for most of his meteoric career. He was Steve McQueen, one of...

From the A&E "Biography" series, a review of the birth, development and cinematic history of Betty Boop, the flapper cartoon character who has been a popular icon since the 1930s.

Betty Boop and Bimbo run away from home, but that night they are scared by a chorus of ghosts singing the title song.

Betty Boop goes to see the fearsome Old Man of the Mountain for herself; he sings the title song and a duet with Betty.

A made-for-TV musical revue, compiled from soundies and film and TV performances by jazz greats from the 1930s to the 1950s.

Young Cab Calloway's mother is concerned, because Cab spends his days listening to the radio, pretending to lead a miniature orchestra. A deacon passing by the apartment hears him singing and advises him go to his wife's gypsy tea room. As she reads the tea leaves, she sees situations which lead to...

A singer, dancer, and bandleader, Cab led one of the most popular African American big bands during the jazz and swing eras of the 1930s-40s, with Harlem’s famous Cotton Club as his home stage. Best known for his “Hi de hi de hi de ho” refrain from signature song “Minnie the Moocher,”...

A film by Chris Robinson.

A reporter interviews Max Fleischer about his creation, and Betty illustrates with excerpts from three prior cartoons.

Louis Jordan, with his band, sings and performs the title song, "Caldonia,", and "Honey Child," "Tillie" and 'Buzz Me", wowing the jitter-buggers, zoot suits and bobby-soxers of the mid-1940s, all built around a wisp of a plot dealing with the difficulties of production in Harlem.

Cab Calloway performs at the Cotton Club before he takes his friends down to Harlem for a jitterbug party.

Cab Calloway and The Cabaliers are singing about how The Big Bad Wolf only talks about his Disney money, Felix the Cat is fat and rich, and Mickey the Mouse is riding in his motor car, while the skunk moans about how "nobody loves me" on account of him just being a "dirty old skunk".

Cab Calloway performs "Blowtop Blues".

Cab Calloway & Dotty Saulter perform "I Was Here When You Left Me".

Cab Calloway sings "We the Cats Shall Hep Ya".

Ossie Davis narrates a history of "race films," films made before 1950 which catered to a primarily black audience.

This jazz musical short has a comedy plot about marital infidelity. Bandleader Cab Calloway plays a ladies man who dates the wife (Fredi Washington) of a train porter who is frequently absent from home. Calloway and his Orchestra perform "Zaz-zuh-zaz" and "The Lady with the Fan" at the Cotton Club...

16mm silent color film shot by Cab Calloway during his 1951 tour in Haiti. This film features footage of Cab Calloway and his band performing on an outdoor stage, the local townspeople, a local Haitian pottery market, and the Presidential Palace and Holy Trinity Cathedral in Port-au-Prince.