This is a clip from the 1941 musical comedy You’ll Never Get Rich (with music by Cole Porter) starring Fred Astaire, Rita Hayworth, Robert Benchley, Cliff Nazarro, and this extra doing some of the finest air shoveling I’ve ever had the pleasure of seeing. According to a conversation on Twitter about the scene:

ddespair

Huh, IMDB mentions this scene as a movie goof, but I was just assuming that the extras were told not to make noise that would interfere with the dialogue. I guess they ADR at the time but maybe they wanted to make it easier to play back?

Dan C

it’s a movie goof for the editor, director, script supervisor, and DP! The extra was doing what they were told. The framing and blocking is to blame.

So here I was about to accuse this extra of phoning it in so hard he didn’t even bother picking up the receiver, when in reality he was doing everything right and everybody else did their job wrong. I can’t believe this ever made it to the final cut of the movie, but if this was the best take out of everything they shot now I really want to see the others, in which I assume everyone forgot their lines and pants.

Keep going for the whole video.

Source: Geekologie – The Best Movie Extra Of 1941