Bolero is a 1934 American pre-Code musical drama film directed by Wesley Ruggles and starring George Raft and Carole Lombard.

The Paramount production was a rare chance for Raft to play a dancer, which had been his profession in New York City, rather than portraying a gangster.

In 1910 New York, Raoul De Baere is a coal miner who wants to be a dancer and tries to persuade his brother Mike to manage him.

When Leona threatens to quit, Mike begins a romantic relationship with her, although he dislikes her jealousy and wage demands.

They appear on the bill with fan dancer Annette, who wants to team with Raoul and tells him that Lord Coray is romantically interested in Helen.

[8] Miriam Hopkins was intended to play the female lead but fell ill while making Design for Living.

[10] The film's title and music are based on Maurice Ravel's Boléro, but the composition was not written until 1928 and the scenes take place in 1914.

Several scenes would likely have been banned by the code, such as those in which Helen auditions in her underwear and Sally Rand performs her famous fan dance.

Raft is a vivid and pictorially interesting type, rather than an actor in the technical sense, and consequently he proves unequal to the full implications of the fame-hungry dancer.

Raft brings to the role gives "Bolero" considerable color, nevertheless, and the film, without coming close to realizing the real possibilities of the story as an overpowering study of megalomania, does manage to be moderately entertaining.

"[15] The Los Angeles Times critic Philip K. Scheuer wrote: "[T]he waits between dances are so interminable, the characters so obtuse and self-centered, that the film emerges largely as a series of anticlimaxes.

[citation needed] Sally Rand's bubble dance was spoofed in Tex Avery's cartoon Hollywood Steps Out (1941).