Fay Craig - Bongo Baby - Cinebox

Jamaican dancer Fay Craig gets down to a bongo rhythym in this kitsch 1960s dance film.

Talented Jamaican-born dancer Fay Craig boosts the blood pressure of two weedy-looking white-coated bongo bashers as she dances up a storm in this early 1960s drum-dance bonanza, produced for the short-lived Cinebox film jukebox system. The Cinebox films all flaunt their over-the-top, kitsch aesthetic, but the exoticisation of Craig through settings and costumes is problematic.

Fay Craig is known to have starred in at least three short films shot for the Cinebox system. A few years earlier in 1959, she'd made an uncredited appearance in Basil Dearden's crime drama Sapphire. Around the time Bongo Baby was produced, she had a role as a nightclub stripper in Charles Saunders' B picture Jungle Street (1961).