(Reviews of Top Hat and Swing Time)
As it's St Valentine's Day, we're going to shift the weekly column on a day and mark 14 February with a double bill of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musicals. Directed by Mark Sandrich, Top Hat (1935) will be 90 later this spring and it's still a joy to watch cinema's finest dancing couple at their most elegant. But there was a little more pizzazz in \George Stevens's Swing Time (1936), which confirmed that Fred and Ginger were masters of screwball comedy.
Refusing to stray from the upper echolons of leisured society, Top Hat is a Jazz Age film that somehow found itself brightening up the tail end of the Depression. It's a treatise on innocent wish-fulfilment, in which people with impeccable manners and sartorial style drift through an Art Deco Neverland while managing to make life and love look ridiculously easy.
Yet Fred Astaire was reluctant to embark upon this fourth pairing with Ginger Rogers, as he still feared becoming part of another team following his stage success with his sister, Adele. However, unprecedented creative freedom convinced him to sign up for this peerless musical comedy, which bore many similarities to The Gay Divorcee (1934).
This was no coincidence, however, as co-scenarist Dwight Taylor had written the libretto for the 1932 Cole Porter show. But the idea of having Ginger mistake Fred for Edward Everett Horton (supposedly the husband of her best friend) came from Alexander Farago and Aladar Laszlo's play, A Scandal in Budapest, which RKO had bought for $10,000, only to have its comic adultery storyline blocked by the Hays Office. The fashion designer subplot was another interpolation, from Irene, which the studio had acquired for Rogers, but ended up making with Anna Neagle in 1940.
Astaire's choreography also owed something to his past, as he had led an evening-dressed chorus through `High Hat' in Funny Face (1927) and machine-gunned down a similarly attired ensemble in `Say, Young Man of Manhattan' in Smiles (1930).
The score, however, was wholly original. Indeed, this was Irving Berlin's first screen musical and he attended all the initial script conferences to ensure that the songs were specifically tailored to both the storyline and Fred and Ginger's talents - thus making this the most integrated movie musical of the period.
`No Strings', for example, comes about because Fred is keen to avoid Horton's suggestion that he settles down. But it also leads to his first meeting with Ginger (after he wakes her in the hotel room below) that completely changes his mind and his sand-danced lullaby similarly intrigues her, as she settles back on her satin pillows. Even the stage number `Top Hat, White Tie and Tails' follows on from Helen Broderick's invitation to Venice and Fred sidles on to the stage still clutching the telegram.
Top Hat is the classic Fred`n'Ginger scenario. They meet accidentally and while he is smitten on sight, she finds him irksome and resists his attentions until their first dance. `Isn't This a Lovely Day (To Be Caught in the Rain)?' is a typical challenge dance, in which Ginger gives as good as she gets (in keeping with her feisty character) until she allows herself to be impressed by Fred's grace and agility.
But true love is never allowed to run smoothly and a comic misunderstanding conspires to keep the couple apart, as Ginger mistakes Fred for Broderick's dithering husband, who is really the English backer of Astaire's West End revue.
Yet, she still loses her heart in a second, more intensely passionate duet, `Cheek to Cheek', which is made all the more deliciously illicit as Ginger dances it thinking that Fred is a married man. Indeed, even after she learns that he is single (thanks to their unchaperoned gondola ride), they still dance `The Piccolino' under the impression that she has just wed foppish Italian dressmaker, Erik Rhodes, and it's only in the closing sequence that the narrative contrivances are happily resolved by the revelation that Ginger was married by Horton's valet (Eric Blore) posing as a clergyman.
Everything about Top Hat was meticulously conceived, although no amount of perfectionism could prevent Ginger's dress from famously shedding ostrich feathers (much to Astaire's fury) during the numerous takes of the Oscar-winning `Cheek to Cheek'.
Van Nest Polglase and Carroll Clark's Venetian sets were particularly splendid. Yet while they evoked the `white telephone' romances then popular in Italy, Mussolini's regime banned the film after taking exception to Erik Rhodes's malapropistic Beddini and perceiving an assault on totalitarian uniformity in Astaire's machine-gun routine.
The Hollywood censors also insisted on a number of cuts. But the majority of excisions - including the songs `Wild About You', `You're the Cause' and `Get Thee Behind Me, Satan' - were made to brisken the action, which so appealed to American audiences that the $620,000 Oscar-nominted-picture took $3.2 million at the box office and remained RKO's most profitable musical for years to come.
Coming after Sandrich's lesser offering, Follow the Fleet (1936), Swing Time is an everyday Top Hat, in which the romance is just as glorious, but its smooth Twenties surfaces have been scuffed by Thirties life. Originally entitled I Won't Dance and then Never Gonna Dance, it saw Fred and Ginger return to Art Deco escapism after the comparative realism of their brush with the US Navy. Yet its glamour was restricted to John Harkrider's fabulous nightclubs, as times were so tough that Fred's dancing gambler has to ride the rails and Ginger is grateful for work at Eric Blore's crummy dance school.
Despite opening with a society wedding, as Fred leaves Betty Furness waiting at the altar, Swing Time depicts a bourgeois world where nothing can be taken for granted. Indeed, its little ironies even extend to the songs, as Fred pretends not to be able to dance in `Pick Yourself Up'; Ginger has shampoo in her hair as she's serenaded with the Oscar-winning `The Way You Look Tonight'; and the climactic duet, `Never Gonna Dance', sees Rogers and Astaire drift agonisingly apart, as, they were in fact doing off screen.
Scripted by Allan Scott (who worked on six Astaire-Rogers vehicles) and Howard Lindsay (who had directed Fred on stage in The Gay Divorce), this is essentially a book musical, with the songs being deftly integrated into the screwball storyline. Having worked on Roberta (1935), Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields knew precisely what was expected of them and their tunes dominated the Your Hit Parade chart for weeks.
But, even at the time, Kern's music was considered slightly old-fashioned. So, arranger Robert Russell Bennett and Astaire's rehearsal pianist, Hal Borne, deserve much of the credit for swinging the soundtrack to some of the stars' finest routines.
An inverted challenge song, with Ginger leading, `Pick Yourself Up' bubbles with the energy and confidence that Astaire and Rogers had acquired as partners and which allowed them to attempt both comic steps and audacious lifts with effortless exuberance. `Waltz in Swing Time' represents a moment of pure moonlit magic that glides by as its unexpected intricacies unfold. It serves no narrative purpose, but allows the pair to showcase their athletic, rhythmic genius and irresistible physical chemistry, which recurs in `A Fine Romance' - which Fields and Kern dubbed `a sarcastic love song' - which is sung in a snowy park, with Ginger looking peeved in a fur coat and a bowler-hatted Fred playing the innocent like Stan Laurel.
Finally, `Never Gonna Dance' proved not just the summation of Swing Time, but of Fred`n'Ginger on film. A rare male torch song that's both witty and melancholic, it was an evening-dressed exchange of emotions that only Rogers and Astaire could express. But it was also hard work, with the last 16 bars requiring 47 takes (with Ginger's feet bleeding from around the 25th).
However, audiences had to wait almost 30 minutes for the first song, after an opening montage showing Fred on a lucky streak and then performing a magic act with sidekick Victor Moore to `It's Not on the Cards' was dropped.
But, Astaire eventually got his solo slot and `Bojangles of Harlem' proved to be the most controversial number of his career. Nowadays, one can only condemn the use of blackface. But, with affectionate lyrics by Dorothy Fields (who had collaborated with African American entertainer Bill `Bojangles' Robinson on RKO's Hooray for Love, 1935), this was a genuine homage from one great artist to another. Moreover, it was a `pop' ballet that anticipated Vicente Minnelli and Gene Kelly's work in An American in Paris (1951), with Astaire using the three giant silhouettes (himself in trick shot) on the screen behind him to provide a link between the minstrel show and cinema, between dance history and his own style.
Yet, despite its musical triumphs, Swing Time did less well commercially than previous Astaire-Rogers outings. Moreover, the critics highlighted the flaws in the derivative plot and bemoaned the frivolous romantic contrivances.
Ginger was also becoming restless, especially as director George Stevens had convinced her that she could become a dramatic star in her own right. Consequently, the duo agreed to take a brief break after their next assignment, Shall We Dance (1937).
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