"Every Little Movement" is a wonderful song from a wonderful scene in a less than wonderful movie, Presenting Lily Mars. The movie was an early Judy Garland musical not produced by Arthur Freed. In it, Judy plays one of her first grown-up romantic leads, opposite Van Heflin. She actually starts out as a lovesick teen, which is what she'd usually played in films up to that time, but becomes a mature woman in the course of the story.
Her character, Lily Mars, is a stage-struck kid who follows a Broadway producer she's met in her home town to New York, looking for a break. Unable to get an interview with the guy, and with no place to stay in the big city, she falls asleep in the orchestra pit of a theater where the producer is rehearsing a show.
She's awakened by an elderly cleaning lady, played by Connie Gilchrist, who tells her not to lose heart and reveals that she was once a leading player on the stage herself. She says she's happy to clean the stage, just to stay a part of the theater. "There was a song," she says, reminiscing, "and it got to be my song" -- and she sings it for Judy up on the stage, eventually doing a simple little dance to go along with it. (Her vocal was dubbed by Mary Kent.) The song was written in 1910 by Karl Hoschna, with lyrics by Otto Harbach.
Judy joins in the dance, and adds a harmony part. As expressions of theatrical sentiment and nostalgia for the days of vaudeville go, the scene is moving and powerful. Even though he didn't produce the film, Freed would appeal often in his own musicals to this same sort of sentiment and nostalgia, this almost mystical faith in the eternal spirit of show business.
The scene is also notable as an expression of professional solidarity between two women of different generations, a gift of empowerment from the older woman and an endorsement of self-reliance. She tells Judy not to go back home and marry her high-school sweetheart but to follow her dream. The quality of the performance of the song gives the scene its dramatic truth, convincing us that the cleaning lady could indeed have been a star in her day, and that Lily might become one in hers. The unabashed emotion of the song, and the affectionate way the two women relate to each other while they sing it, lifts the moment out of the realm of the intellectual and political and makes it emblematic of a genuine, practical, everyday sort of feminism.
You just don't see stuff like this in modern movies, for all their rote celebrations of sisterhood. That fact is in itself an indictment of contemporary popular cinema as a conveyor of humane values.
It's worth watching Presenting Lily Mars just for this scene and this song alone.