By Scott Ross
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I recently watched, over a period of several months, the nine RKO pictures in the 2007 DVD set Astaire and Rogers: The Complete Film Collection (to me, inexplicably unavailable on Blu-ray).* I’ve seen them all, of course, more than once and, in the cases of the three best pictures in the series (The Gay Divorcee, Top Hat, Swing Time) on multiple occasions, but had not until last autumn watched them in sequence. What follows, culled from my monthly video reports, does not aspire to being a definitive overview of the series. If you’re interested in that you can do no better than to get your hands on a copy of Arlene Croce’s The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Book (1972; reissued in 2010) which is, as Pauline Kael observed in The New Yorker when it was first published, “the best book that will ever be written about Astaire and Rogers.” At best, these capsule reviews might, I hope, whet your appetite for the finest series of musicals ever made in this country or, if you have also watched and loved them, remind you of the reasons for your love.
Before we go further (and this may stop you cold) understand that I regard Fred Astaire as the single most important figure in the development of the American musical movie and, in Ethan Mordden’s designation, the most wonderful man in musicals. That isn’t to suggest that he had no limitations. He wasn’t much of a listener, for one thing — Rogers had it all over her partner in that respect — and his acting hasn’t the depth she brought to what she did dramatically. I also think she’s funnier than he is; she had a grounding in comedy where his was mostly in dance. And while he was, in his way, a handsome man, he was certainly no romantic paragon. His head was curiously shaped, like a less amusing version of Stan Laurel, with a long chin and a wide head accentuated by his thinning hair and, on film, his high-forehead toupées. His singing may strike you as an acquired taste as well, thin in the higher registers and lacking that conventional power the more obvious talents in musical theatre had, sometimes to their own detriment. (Al Jolson is especially problematic in this respect.) Astaire also had large hands; he reminds me a bit of Sergei Rachmaninoff, whose freakish digital reach influenced the way he composed for the piano, to the despair of later exponents of his music. Astaire dealt with his hands, about which he was understandably self-conscious, by turning his fingers inward. If you watch him closely you’ll notice that while he’s dancing his hands are seldom open or his fingers splayed. Other dancers, with smaller hands, use their finger-widths in more overt ways, as expressive extensions of their exuberance. Astaire tried to make his disappear.
So, what, with all these seeming defects, makes Astaire so marvelous? Gore Vidal once ventured that style was, “knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.” Astaire put it more simply: “Do it big, do it right, and do it with style.” But anyone can “do it big.” Bigness is a kind of style, I suppose — no one was bigger as a theatrical singer than Ethel Merman. Yet for Merman, the bigness of her vocalizing was a part of who she was as a performer. Mary Martin, with her entrancing coloratura soprano, could be quite demure. Merman couldn’t be Mary Martin, and didn’t try. Yet when she nailed a note, like that “Ohhhhhhh…” near the climax of “I Got Rhythm,” she was doing more than stopping the show; she was telling the listener that she was so crazy in love she’d become effervescent. That’s character. (The song made her an instant Broadway star in 1930.) Astaire as I’ve said didn’t have that power, and he didn’t have anything like Merman’s range. No popular singer, however, including Bing Crosby, was more sought-after by more great songwriters than Astaire. He understood instinctively the importance of a lyric, and he gave the words the sort of emphasis, without ostentation, that made lyricists like Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter and Irving Berlin swoon; no one ever made their words sound so inevitable, so surprising or so attractive. Astaire also understood rhythm better than any male singer of his day, again including Crosby. It’s not surprising that, while he could play the piano decently (those large hands must have been an asset), his real instrument was the drum-kit. That Fred Astaire was a great dancer was understood by everyone who’d seen him, but what is less well perceived is how beautifully he moved off the dance floor, a trait he shared with Cary Grant. At the beginning of the middling caper picture The Midas Run, the camera catches the lower half of a man walking jauntily along a London street, and in seconds you know it can’t be anyone but Astaire. The walk is of a piece with his general gracefulness and his unerring sense of style in the clothing he wore, another thing he shared with Grant. He was an enormously appealing man.
Astaire was also, in addition to his dancing (and although it’s not generally discussed or understood) a great choreographer for the screen. He worked out his own routines, with his friend and collaborator Hermes Pan, who doubled for Fred’s female partners as they created the dances. It was Fred Astaire more than anyone else who set the best style for shooting dance for the screen, keeping the full figures of the dancers in the frame and, whenever possible, filming in long, unbroken medium takes that captured the excitement of performance, both for the audience and for the dancers. There are not, I don’t think, any more exuberant, joyous dance duets in movies than “Isn’t This a Lovely Day (To Be Caught in the Rain)?” in Top Hat, “Let Yourself Go” in Follow the Fleet and “Pick Yourself Up” in Swing Time, and no more devastating emotional dances than “Let’s Face the Music and Dance” in Fleet and “Never Gonna Dance,” again in Swing Time, and much of the thrill, and the pleasure, those numbers convey is due to how they were filmed. Astaire was as well a modern in his aversion to what he called “mushy stuff,” a disdain he shared with the best lyricists of the time. The love songs he sang came at romance, as Emily Dickinson would say, “slant,” and there’s no on-screen kissing in the Astaire-Rogers pictures until Carefree. Perhaps it came in part from his being yoked to his sister Adele all those years in vaudeville, in London and on Broadway, but the breeziness of Astaire’s attitude, refreshing in the 1930s, still comes across as a tonic.
Astaire isn’t everything, of course, in the Astaire and Rogers movies. Ginger holds half the appeal, and what he wasn’t, she was (and vice-versa.) She wasn’t a terribly good singer, which accounts for most of the songs in their pictures being sung by Fred, but she had a gift for high comic invention Astaire hadn’t, and despite a certain coarseness in her looks and personality she was often adorable. Not the natural dancer he was, she had to work harder at it. Sometimes the work shows, but what we remember most about her dancing is how much fun she seems to be having even when, as the records show, she may have been in physical agony. Rogers’ challenge dances with Fred are the one of the things I most look forward to when I sit down to watch an Astaire-Rogers picture, along with anticipating the display of his seemingly bottomless charm and the superb music America’s best composers of popular songs turned out when they knew they were writing for him.
Flying Down to Rio (1933) Remembered chiefly as the first picture in which Fred Astaire danced with Ginger Rogers. This happens in a silly but infectious number called the “Carioca,” which among other things involves the partners pressing their foreheads together. Somehow Fred and Ginger carried off that indignity with enough panache that movie audiences of 1933 demanded more of them, and you can see why; their joy in performing together was obvious. (Of course, having spent his entire performing life partnered with his sister Adele, recently retired to England, Fred was most definitely not in the mood to be yoked again to another dancer. After The Gay Divorcee in 1934 became one of the biggest hits of its year, however, the matter was effectively out of his hands.)
While the plot, based on an unpublished comedy by the playwright and lyricist Anne Caldwell,† is perfunctory, the leads, Dolores del Río and Gene Raymond, are engaging, and the picture has a nifty gimmick: Scenes of Brazilian life that, through the creative use of the optical printer, become living picture-postcards, each flipping past to reveal the next. There is also, in Fred’s enthusiastic title number, a shocking moment (presumably the work of the movie’s producer, Merian C. Cooper, the begettor of King Kong) when during an aerial routine a young woman falls screaming from a trapeze below a biplane. She’s rescued, of course, but it’s an electrifying bit, and I wonder if George Roy Hill and William Goldman had it in mind when they made The Great Waldo Pepper 40 years later. As Arlene Croce wrote in The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Book, “Merian C. Cooper brought terror to the movie musical.”
The songs, which include a very likeable solo number for Ginger called “Music Makes Me,” were by Vincent Youmans, with spritely lyrics by Gus Kahn and Edward Eliscu. Flying Down to Rio is also notable for pairing two incomparable comic sissies, Franklin Pangborn and Eric Blore, as a hotel manager and his simpering assistant. Blore would come into full flower, as it were, in his later Astaire & Rogers appearances.
The Gay Divorcee (1935) After their brief duet on “The Carioca” in Flying Down to Rio set up a public clamor for more, a re-teaming of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers by RKO was inevitable. Their first starring vehicle was an adaptation of Astaire’s last Broadway success (The Gay Divorce, a title apparently taboo under the Production Code) and in the blinkered tradition of Hollywood studio lunacy the entire Cole Porter stage score was tossed with the exception of “Night and Day,” its biggest hit. Although the movie isn’t as buoyant as the team’s best work it’s a lively picture, funny, absurd and engaging. It also sets the template for the Astaire-Rogers series: Initial dislike of Fred by Ginger (or like followed by misunderstanding leading to dislike, or some other variation on the theme), cast of wacky supporting actors (such as Edward Everett Horton, Eric Blore, Erik Rhodes, the wisecracking Helen Broderick or, here, the charming Alice Brady), screwball complications, a romantic dance and, if we’re lucky, a challenge. I’m one of those oddballs — Pauline Kael was another — who prefer the non-romantic Fred & Ginger routines to their more celebrated ballroom turns, except (as in Follow the Fleet and Swing Time) when the duets are dramatic. Many think the essence of Astaire and Rogers are items like “Cheek to Cheek” and, here, “Night and Day,” and they’re marvelous expressions of romance but they don’t, at least for me, carry the absolute joy of “I’ll Be Hard to Handle,” “Let Yourself Go” and “Pick Yourself Up”… the latter pair of which, juxtaposed that way, sound like an answer in one of those ironic double-feature puzzles. Dances like those sum up the appeal of Astaire and Rogers as a team far more than the formal love-duets; although they, like the ballroom dances, were thoroughly worked out, they feel spontaneous in a way the romantic dances never can. You get a sense, despite the sweat, of the joy of performance in “Isn’t it a Lovely Day (To Be Caught in the Rain?),” for example, and despite Astaire’s displeasure at being part of a team again after his sister Adele broke up the act, of the pleasure each performer took in the other.
The Gay Divorcee was directed by Mark Sandrich, who guided Astaire and Rogers in more pictures than anyone else, and his crisp style is as much a part of the team’s work as those white Art Deco sets and the loopy plots, usually cobbled by Allan Scott or Dwight Taylor. (This one was written by by George Marion Jr., Dorothy Yost and Edward Kaufman, but the original stage book was by Taylor.) David Abel’s beautiful cinematography, evident here, was on display in five of the nine pictures Astaire and Rogers made together at RKO as well as Holiday Inn, also directed by Sandrich. In this initial offering, the producers (or producer, since Pardo S. Berman was credited) hadn’t yet grasped that Astaire and Rogers were what people wanted to see, not elaborate musical numbers with a cast of thousands, so we get “The Continental” for 17 exhausting minutes, only a few of which are given over to Ginger and Fred. Worse, the creators assigned an entirely extraneous number to Edward Everett Horton(!) and a young Betty Grable, “Let’s K-nock K-nees,” which when I see it always makes me think of Arlene Croce’s riposte in The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Book: “Must we?” The “Night and Day” dance, on the other hand, based on the stage version choreographed by Fred, is one of the duets people who love the team remember best, and it’s beautifully worked out. The picture ends with another of Fred’s cleverly conceived dances from the stage show, in which he and Rogers sail over the sofas and chairs of his hotel suite, and it’s so casually charming it makes you grin in deep appreciation.
A personal note: I first saw The Gay Divocee at a summer afternoon library screening about 40 years ago. Seated behind my friend and me were a pair of elderly Jewish women, complete with Molly Picon immigrant accents. When the picture began with nightclub patrons, including Fred, playing with little legless dolls through which their forefingers were inserted to make them “dance,” one of the women cooed happily to her companion, “Cute!… is that cute?”
I can never see this movie without recalling the pleasure my friend and I got from that, at that moment and for years afterward in the remembering.
Roberta (1935) Such were the vagaries of the 1930s Hollywood studio system that Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, fresh from their triumph in The Gay Divorcee, were cast as supporting characters in this adaptation of the Jerome Kern/Otto Harbach stage musical. One doesn’t mind so much that their over-the-title co-star is the charming Irene Dunne; that Randolph Scott is given equal weight is practically an offense against God and Mammon. His performance in this, and in the subsequent Follow the Fleet (see below) leave one to marvel that he ever had an important career, or that he may have been the love of Cary Grant’s young life. I hope at least he was good in bed, because he certainly stinks up this movie.
When Fred and Ginger are on screen, or Helen Westley as Dunne’s eponymous dress-designing aunt, or Dunne herself is singing “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” Roberta is first-rate entertainment. So let’s concentrate on those strengths, shall we, and forget if we can Scott’s performance and the number of times he says something is “swell”? Fred plays a bandleader, and gets a lively number (“Let’s Begin”) with his musicians, notably Candy Candido, with whom he does a kind of genderfuck bit avant la lettre. Ginger is Fred’s American former girlfriend, passing herself off as a Polish countess (I’m not kidding) in Paris. Although Astaire and Rogers do one of their ballroom specialties, to “Lovely to Look At” and “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” their two other numbers are a lot more fun: The satirical “I Won’t Dance” and “I’ll Be Hard to Handle,” one of those joyous episodes of thoroughly worked-out yet seemingly impromptu hoofing that were, even more than their signature romantic duets, their peculiar specialty. On the debit side, Dunne has to perform “Yesterdays,” featuring one of Harbach’s worst sets of lyrics. No singer, not even one as lyrical as Irene Dunne, can be expected to triumph with lyrics like,
Yesterdays
Days I knew as happy sweet
Sequestered days […]
Then gay youth was mine
And truth was mine
Joyous free and flaming life
Forsooth was mine
Who in the 1930s talked like that, let alone sang? That last bit is so convoluted and linguistically passé it occasioned one of Billie Holiday’s few recorded lyric flubs.
William A. Seiter, most of whose pictures were mediocrities, directed with intelligence and a certain gracefulness of style that does what it can to make the material seem more interesting than it is. Alan Scott was one of the three credited screenwriters, and the author of the movie’s “additional dialogue” was the same Glenn Tryon who starred in the 1926 silent comedy 45 Minutes from Hollywood, with Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy in brief cameos, and who would go on to star in two movies (Lonesome and Broadway) for the expressionistic Hungarian director Paul Fejos before drifting into screenwriting and direction.
Top Hat (1935) No one should be forced to choose a single Astaire-Rogers musical, and I am always torn between this one and Swing Time. Top Hat is probably the better movie: it’s swifter, more sparkling, lays some nice emphasis on those two incomparable sissies Eric Blore and Edward Everett Horton, and boasts a perfect Irving Berlin score including a title song that elegantly sums up the appeal of Fred Astaire, whom Graham Greene once called the human equivalent of Mickey Mouse. That isn’t the insult it seems; in the early ‘30s Mickey was not yet the figure of dull respectability he became; he was rambunctious, elastic, mischievous, even slightly cruel — just like Fred.
Perhaps inspired by their “Let Yourself Go” duet in Follow the Fleet Astaire and Rogers also get a challenge-dance here to “Isn’t This a Lovely Day (to be Caught in the Rain?)” that is not only among their half-dozen or so best routines, it’s also a rapturous expression of the sheer joy of performance. If these two didn’t fall in love after a number like that, one of them would have to be frigid and the other gay. After the requisite complications, masquerades and misunderstandings, the pair performs Berlin’s lilting, sensuous “Cheek to Cheek” in a Venice ballroom and featuring Ginger’s feathered dress which, although it drove her partner to distraction, proved that she understood what looked best on her when she danced with him; and another of those new dance sensations, “The Piccolino,” led off by Ginger’s charming verse and chorus. This brings me to a side-note: However wonderful a performer Fred Astaire was — and aside from his status as the finest dancer the movies have ever known he was also one of the American songbook’s great stylists — compare the way he listens to Ginger singing with the way in which she takes in his vocalizations: He smiles a lot but looks faintly glazed; she hangs on every word whether she’s facing him or not, and always seems to be hearing them for the first time. She not only (in the cartoonist Bob Thaves’ memorable phrase) “did everything Fred did, backwards and in heels”; at times she also acted him off the screen.
All of the members of the RKO Astaire-Rogers machine were involved here: The producer Pando S. Berman; the director Mark Sandrich (he made five of their pictures, and his style is modest but elegant and his pacing is nearly always perfect); the screenwriters Allan Scott and Dwight Taylor; the cinematographer David Abel, whose polished black-and-white photography is what we think of when we remember the Astaire-Rogers pictures, along with those gloriously anachronistic all-white Art Deco sets designed by Carroll Clark but erroneously attributed to the wonderfully-named Van Nest Polglase (Venice never looked so clean); the choreography was by Fred with Hermes Pan; the musical direction and orchestrations were by Hal Bourne; and the cast includes Erik Rhodes as a silly, English-mangling Italian co-respondent, Horton as Fred’s manager, the vermouth-dry Helen Broderick as his wife and Blore as his butler Bates, who feuds with him throughout and whose machinations resolve the plot. The main titles, incidentally, are fairly unique for their time, with first Fred’s feet and legs dancing into the frame and appearing above his name, and then Ginger’s. It’s a marvelously stylish gesture, almost a shorthand, one that hints at the spirited revelry to come.
Produced on a relatively lavish Depression-era budget of $609,000, Top Hat brought in $3.2 million at the box-office, and became the most profitable RKO release of the decade.
Follow the Fleet (1936) Adhering to the pattern set by Roberta in 1935 (and why would you want to?) RKO once again made Astaire and Rogers more or less subservient to Randolph Scott. As if that wasn’t bad enough the men play sailors, and Astaire’s idea of expressing his working-class bona fides is to constantly be chewing gum.
Well, at least Irving Berlin wrote the songs. Ginger gets the sexy “Let Yourself Go,” which she and Fred then dance to, in an “impromptu” ballroom contest exhibition. It’s one of their most joyous numbers, performed by both of them with a rubber-legged, loose-limbed panache that makes you smile broadly throughout. Most of Fred’s numbers are done with his Navy band (“We Saw The Sea,” “I’d Rather Lead A Band,” “I’m Putting All My Eggs in One Basket”) but Harriet Hilliard, the future Mrs. Ozzie Nelson (and mother of Ricky) has a splendid solo in “Get Thee Behind Me, Satan.” I know I’m in the minority in believing this to be one of Berlin’s finest ballads, but it is in any case beautifully framed by the director Mark Sandrich and his cinematographer David Abel, and at least partially redeems the horrible “Why, without your glasses you’re beautiful!” old-maid cliché Hilliard is forced to endure before she sings. (Berlin originally wrote the song, interestingly, for Rogers to perform in Top Hat. Obviously, he thought well of it.) What makes Follow the Fleet special, however, and secures it a place in movie musical history (or at least, in Astaire-Rogers iconography) is the “Let’s Face the Music and Dance” number. It was the most dramatic entry in the series until “Never Gonna Dance” in Swing Time displaced it a year later, and its seriousness of intent — it begins with Fred and Ginger in a gambling den, separately losing their bankrolls and contemplating suicide — is almost shocking in the context of so light an entertainment, and the dance between them is so charged with unstated emotionalism it’s hair-raising.
The screenplay was credited to Allan and Scott Dwight Taylor with “Additional Dialogue,” as they used to say, by Lew Lipton. At least in this one Randolph Scott doesn’t say “Swell!” every other line. Sharp eyes will spot Betty Grable as a trio singer, Lucille Ball in a small role and Humphrey Bogart as a sailor. The Hubert Osbourne 1922 play Shore Leave, on which Follow the Fleet was based, incidentally, had a long afterlife: It was also the source for the 1927 Vincent Youmans musical Hit the Deck, itself filmed by MGM in 1955.
Swing Time (1936) With the 1935 Top Hat one of the two best Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musicals, containing a pair of the team’s most exhilarating dances and, in Jerome Kern’s music and Dorothy Fields’ lyrics, just about the greatest score of its kind ever written for a movie musical. Despite its occasional longueurs (and a truly silly finale) the picture inspired Astaire to one of his supreme achievements as a choreographer: The dance with Rogers to “Never Gonna Dance.” This breathless medley not only dramatically recaps the romance of the characters in this movie but almost everything for which we love these two. The final portion, shot in a single fluid take, required 46 re-takes and somewhere in the middle of it all Rogers’ feet started to bleed.
The Howard Lindsay/Allan Scott screenplay is a bit overstuffed, or maybe it only feels that way because it was directed by George Stevens, seldom remembered for concision. It has the same clean, Art Deco look as its predecessors, thanks in part to David Abel’s gorgeous cinematography, and there’s a good supporting cast which includes Victor Moore as Astaire’s card-sharp sidekick, the always witty Helen Broderick as Moore’s eventual inamorata and, as a dyspeptic dance-school manager, the peerless Eric Blore. Kern, who more than any figure until Richard Rodgers had the most profound influence on the Broadway musical, composed a score so rich in melodic invention it dwarfs the work of almost everyone else in movies, and Fields matches him in words. Her lyrics always sparkled, but she was also a musical dramatist, beautifully evidenced in the witty “A Fine Romance”: It’s hard to imagine any male lyricist of the time other than perhaps Cole Porter writing a couplet like, “I never mussed the crease in your blue serge pants/I never get the chance,” and I am always moved by the way she constructed the lyrics for “Never Gonna Dance.” First, there is the repeated Depression-era invocation of the wolf at the door; second, the unspoken metaphor of the movies’ greatest male dancer seeming to put up his dancing shoes (“on beautiful trees”) as renunciation of an unrequited romance; third, her sharp sense of rhythmic and dramatic ascension. Ginger’s character is called Penny here, and from Fred’s repetition of the phrase, “‘Though I’m left without a penny…” Fields builds to, “So, I’m left without my Penny…” [Emphasis mine.] That’s as good in its way as Stephen Sondheim in A Little Night Music‘s “The Miller’s Son” repeating, “We’ll go dancing” and finally resolving the image as, “We’ll have dancing.”
Kern was uncomfortable with swing, so the rapturous “Waltz in Swing Time” was cobbled together by the orchestrator Robert Russell Bennett from themes the composer provided. Of the lyrical ballad “The Way You Look Tonight” Fields said, “The first time Jerry played that melody for me I went out and started to cry. The release absolutely killed me. I couldn’t stop, it was so beautiful.” (The song is also, at 68 bars, more than twice the length of the 32-bar standard.) The single number in Swing Time that raises eyebrows today is Fred’s “Bojangles of Harlem”; although Astaire is wearing tan make-up on his head and neck, it’s not “blackface,” which is exaggerated and used to demean and ridicule (even when black performers did it themselves) — here it’s the dancing equivalent of an actor playing Othello. Oddly, however, although Fields’ lyric certainly evokes Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, the dancer whose moves Astaire imitates in his solo is John W. Bubbles, from whom he took tap lessons, and he’s dressed in a manner similar to Bubbles’ starring role as Sportin’ Life in Porgy and Bess. If there is shame to be apportioned to the number it may lie in the music sheets bearing a notation on a certain passage as corresponding to Fred’s “jig dance,” in acknowledgment of an old child’s toy, which often (but not always) depicted a stereotyped black man. Jig (or “jigger”) dance toys do not, however, automatically represent a racist viewpoint, so one could argue about this matter endlessly instead of enjoying Astaire’s performance, especially when he’s dancing in front of, and competing with, three gigantic, identically-dressed silhouettes.‡
In Swing Time Fred’s a dancer (although he makes his living as a gambler… I said the finale was silly, and it is, but not any sillier than that plot-point) but when he meets Ginger, a dance instructor, pretends he isn’t so she’ll be forced to teach him. This leads to what seems to me the most joyous dance in the series, “Pick Yourself Up,” wherein when Astaire is forced to show off to save Rogers’ job they, in Arlene Croce‘s memorable phrase, “leave the place in flames.” With “Never Gonna Dance,” Astaire’s and Rogers’ characters bid heartbreaking adieu to each other in dance, and it’s arguably the most dramatic dance number the movies had ever seen to that time. Nothing the pair did before or after comes close… which of course means no one else could either.
Shall We Dance (1937) The financial returns on this, the seventh teaming of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, were less than half those of its predecessor, which suggested to some that the partnership was slipping with the public but there’s little reason, it seems to me, to suppose that. Rather, it was the way the team was being treated by their studio that pushed the audience away. It certainly didn’t help that they were expected to accept Fred as a Russian ballet star, a thing I’m surprised Astaire didn’t quash in the writing; he had no sympathy with the ballet and certainly little aptitude for it, and the central complication (are the pair married or aren’t they?) is at best mildly diverting and at worst annoying. It’s telling that, in addition to the credited scenarists Allan Scott and Ernest Pagano, Lee Loeb and Harold Buchman got story credit, P.J. Wolfson adaptation credit and at least three uncredited writers (Anne Morrison Chapin, James Gow and Edmund H. North) either worked on the treatment or the final script. The whole thing has a feeling of polished desperation about it, and that many writers on as slight a story as this surely indicates something.
George Gershwin, whose last full score this was, complained bitterly that the filmmakers did not exploit his and his brother Ira’s songs sufficiently, and he had a point. Fred sings a brief “(I’ve Got) Beginner’s Luck” to Ginger but there is no dance to go with the vocal, for example, and where a dance of loss seems absolutely required after he sings “They Can’t Take That Away from Me” to her, they’re on a fog-bound ferry so there’s no place for them to dance. Astaire has a great routine with a luxury liner’s engine room crew to “Slap That Bass,” one of his engaging specialties, but I don’t see how the song could have become a hit. “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off” did eventually find its way into the American song book, despite rather than due to Fred and Ginger’s Central Park roller skating routine to it as did “They All Laughed,” which Rogers sings wearing a wonderfully designed flowered skirt that shows off her remarkably slender waist and which she and Astaire perform in one of their charming challenge dances. But the title number had no real chance to catch on, not only because the dance to it is based on a gimmick (a chorus of dancers wearing Ginger masks and which Rogers joins to Fred’s consternation) but largely because it is introduced by the gruesome contortions of the alleged prima ballerina Harriet Hoctor, the worst routine in the Astaire-Rogers filmography. And to think they offered her the lead in this picture!
Carefree (1938) The seventh teaming of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers is the slightest of their RKO musicals, the first to lose money, and the one with the least dancing. Another of those pictures whose complicated screenwriting credits betray a certain amount of panic (the script was by Allan Scott and Ernest Pagano from an “original idea” by Marian Ainslee and Guy Endore, its “story and adaptation” by the redoubtable Dudley Nichols and Hagar Wilde, credited that same year with Bringing Up Baby) the picture casts Astaire as a dancing psychoanalyst trying to break through Rogers’ resistance to marrying Ralph Bellamy (it takes a shrink to figure that out?) and in the process falling for her himself. There are some good lines and funny situations, as when Ginger, a radio singer, wrecks her own live show under hypnosis, but there are also items that make you squirm, such as the way, again having been hypnotized, she hunts Astaire down with a shotgun, repeatedly proclaiming that “men like him should be shot down like dogs.” Fun-nee!
Adding to the troubles are an ill-conceived dream sequence set to one of Irving Berlin’s less interesting tunes, which by its conception demanded to be filmed in color but which RKO refused to do, making a hash of a song Berlin pointedly called “I Used to Be Color Blind.” (It also contains a slow-motion dance, a device I resist on principle, and a prolonged kiss between Fred and Ginger, which is just plain objectionable.) There’s an extended New Dance Sensation called “The Yam,” whose melody Berlin later adapted for his war-time anthem “Any Bonds Today?” and which illustrates that a certain degree of democratization in the Astaire and Rogers universe is unwelcome; instead of those gleaming, absurd but oddly endearing white Art Deco sets complete with extras in evening dress that were the series’ mainstay from Flying Down to Rio through Swing Time we’re in a woodsy country club with patrons joining in the dance, and who wants that? Fortunately, Fred and Ginger get a good Berlin ballad (“Change Partners”) and subsequent dance routine in which he uses his big, expressive hands in an attempt to re-hypnotize her. Even better, Astaire has a jaw-dropping bit, set to a wordless tune (“Since They Turned ‘Loch Lomond’ into Swing”) in which he rhythmically hits one golf ball after another, sending every one of them soaring in perfect arcs, the entire routine performed in long, sustained camera shots. Was there nothing the man couldn’t do?
The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle (1939) Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers’ last RKO picture is also their most unusual: A “biopic” celebrating the first great, and most influential, ballroom dance team in America. Astaire’s approach to the dancing was so scrupulous (Vernon Castle was one of his youthful idols) that aficionados of Astaire and Rogers may be disappointed because they are dancing in character, and keeping to the style that made the Castles household names in the period between 1912 and 1918, especially their wildly popular “Castle Walk.” Astaire and Rogers were far better-looking than the Castles, and their teaming, still fresh on this, their ninth collaboration, makes their Vernon and Irene the most romantic pair imaginable. The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle is not, thankfully, a musical biography — no phony, Cole Porter-being-inspired-to-compose-“Night and Day”-by-raindrops moments here. The music is made up almost entirely of period instrumentals that accompany the Castles as they dance. There is only one original song (“Only When You’re in My Arms” by Con Conrad, Herman Ruby and Bert Kalmar), and it’s used as a diegetic source, Vernon singing the lyric as he works up the nerve to propose to Irene Foote. I’m always a little annoyed when I see the picture that the Foote’s family retainer was changed to a white man and played by Walter Brennan, although given the prevailing tendency in Hollywood to depict black men and women as “coons” for comic relief, it’s probably just as well that Walter Ash was written white.
This is the only RKO “Fred & Ginger” in which the pair portray a married couple (they’re also married in The Barkleys of Broadway, but that was 10 years later, at MGM) and while there is some tension between Vernon and Irene early on in their story, the typical screwball courting elements are, obviously, absent. Similarly, although the Castles’ eventual agent is played by the wry, eccentric Edna May Oliver and she becomes a genial confidante to the pair, she isn’t a full-blown zany like Edward Everett Horton, Eric Blore, Helen Broderick or Alice Brady in the earlier Astaire-Rogers pictures. She’s only mildly zany. (Speaking of zanies: You may recognize Leonid Kinskey as the artist in Paris whom Oliver patronizes from his appearance as the bartender Sasha in Casablanca, ardent for Madeline Lebeau.) The movie is pleasantly directed by H. C. Potter, Robert de Grasse provided rich, warm photography, and there are some striking visual effects by Vernon L. Walker, particularly the sequence where the couple dances across a map of the United States. However, the affecting grief of the scene in which Walter breaks the news of Vernon’s shocking death to Irene, and Rogers’ fine acting of it, is almost canceled out by the terrible dialogue Brennan is given to speak. Astaire is engaging, as he nearly always is, yet in some ways Vernon and Irene Castle is a showcase for Rogers, from her hilariously overblown rendition of “The Yama-Yama Man” to the moment, late in the picture, when Irene unexpectedly meets Vernon, an RAF volunteer, in a nightclub and as he embraces her she whispers, “Oh, Vernon” in a way that in its emotion and anxiety seems to anticipate her husband’s later needless death. Rogers gives a beautiful performance in what Arlene Croce in The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Book rightly calls “a very dear film.”
For the record, the screenplay was by Richard Sherman, Oscar Hammerstein II and Dorothy Yost. The movie is often referred to as a flop. It wasn’t — it was popular with the public — but its budget (approximately $1,196,000) meant that even its high gross ($1,825,000) did not allow it to break even.
*Swing Time has been made available on Blu-ray in the Criterion Collection, presumably because the inveterate auteurists at Criterion regard it as a director’s picture rather than as a Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movie.
†Caldwell, one of the most prolific librettists of her time, frequently collaborated with Jerome Kern. Together the pair wrote one of the most charming numbers heard in a stage musical (She’s a Good Fellow, 1919) of the early 20th century, “The Bullfrog Patrol.” This delightful harmonized duet, originally performed by the Duncan Sisters, virtually defines what the Germans mean by the term Ohrwurm, which we translate as “earworm.” Caldwell is virtually forgotten today, but my hat is off to a lyricist who could write a line like, “I wish that Bolsheviki froggy-dog would croak!” I realize the song is written (and composed) in a minstrel form, which today puts it, I suppose, automatically beyond the… er… pale… but listening to Jeanne Lehman and Rebecca Luker’s 1992 version of it always gives me enormous pleasure.
‡And no, Virginia, “jig” when applied to dance is not racist terminology, despite the teeth-gnashing of the Woke Ignoratti. (Nor is it, even if Millennials and their Gen-Z successors believe so, interchangeable with the word “gig.”) “Jigger,” it will shock them to learn, is innocent as well. These people are like the old movie censors: By their hysteria they suggest that their own racist impulses are at work in their protestations; by their volubility, they only encourage the rest of us to use the words they object to more often.
Text copyright 2024 by Scott Ross
So few critics, so many poets 
And your aside reminds me of Felix Leiter’s advice to James Bond in Diamonds Are Forever about proper behaviour (sic) in America: “People are so damn sensitive about colour around here that you can’t even ask a barman for a jigger of rum. You have to ask for a jegro.”
Thanks for that, and thanks too for the “Like”!