Friday Minute
No. 151 | August 20, 2010

Hoofing It

Our theme this week
The incomparable Fred Astaire

 

Featured this week (theme introduction)
Monday         —   “Cheek to Cheek” / Top Hat (1935)
Tuesday         —   “Begin the Beguine” / Broadway Melody of 1940 (1940)
Wednesday    —   “One for My Baby (and One More for the Road)” / The Sky’s the Limit (1942)
Thursday        —   “You’re All the World to Me” / Royal Wedding (1951)

“Puttin’ on the Ritz”

Fred Astaire was neither the first nor the last to record Irving Berlin’s “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” but he’s the performer most closely associated with the tune.  His performance comes in Blue Skies, the Paramount musical that was billed as “Astaire’s last picture.”  After performing for the public for forty years, the actor-singer-dancer had had enough.  At the age of 47, he called it quits.  “Puttin’ on the Ritz” was his “last dance.”

It didn’t work out very well.  Retirement, that is.  Fred Astaire continued to make movies into the 1980s.

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Blue Skies (1946)
Stuart Heisler, director
Irving Berlin (story), Allan Scott (adaptation), Arthur Sheekman (writer)
“Puttin’ on the Ritz”
Irving Berlin, music and lyrics
Fred Astaire, Hermes Pan, Dave Robel, choreographers
Fred Astaire

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Quote of note
“No dancer can watch Fred Astaire and not know that we all should have been in another business.”
—Mikhail Baryshnikov

…58…59…60.

Thursday Minute
No. 150 | August 19, 2010

Hoofing It

Our theme this week
The incomparable Fred Astaire

Featured this week (theme introduction)
Monday         —   “Cheek to Cheek” / Top Hat (1935)
Tuesday         —   “Begin the Beguine” / Broadway Melody of 1940 (1940)
Wednesday    —   “One for My Baby (and One More for the Road)” / The Sky’s the Limit (1942)

“You’re All the World to Me”

The story borrows from Fred Astaire’s real life.  He and his sister, Adele, were dance partners before she went to England and married a duke.  In Royal Wedding, Astaire and Joan Powell play a brother-and-sister dance duo who take their show to London, where he meets another dancer (Sarah Churchill) and she meets an aristocrat (Peter Lawford).  Love is all around, as the town is buzzing with preparations for a royal wedding.

The film has a memorable sequence with Astaire dancing solo with a hat rack to “Sunday Jumps.”  A dancer like Astaire makes any partner look good.  The showstopper is “You’re All the World to Me,” seen in the clip below.  I showed it to my four-year-old son and asked him what he thought of Astaire’s dancing.  He said, “It looks hard—super hard.”  Indeed.

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Royal Wedding (1951)
Stanley Donen, director
Alan Jay Lerner, writer
“You’re All the World to Me”
Burton Lane, music; Alan Jay Lerner, lyrics
Fred Astaire, Nick Castle, choreographers
Fred Astaire

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Quote of note
“Your paltry, unconscionable commercials are the antithesis of everything my lovely, gentle father represented.”
—Ava Astaire, criticizing the company that made Dirt Devil, for digitally replacing a hat rack with a vacuum cleaner in a TV ad campaign in 1997

…58…59…60.

Wednesday Minute
No. 149 | August 18, 2010

Hoofing It

Our theme this week
The incomparable Fred Astaire

 

Featured this week (theme introduction)
Monday         —   “Cheek to Cheek” / Top Hat (1935)
Tuesday         —   “Begin the Beguine” / Broadway Melody of 1940 (1940)

“One for My Baby (and One More for the Road)”

The Sky’s the Limit is another RKO musical, this one a wartime story that takes a darker turn.  Fred Astaire plays Fred, a pilot AWOL from the Air Force who ends up in New York.  There he meets and falls in love with Joan, a photographer played by Joan Leslie.  Astaire forgoes his usual role of the happy-go-lucky charmer, paying a price for it with critics and audiences of the time.  Yet his performance offers an interesting side to his persona, demonstrating a range he’s sometime not given credit for.

Late in the film, when he thinks he’s lost Joan for good, he’s drunk and angry and spits out a rendition of “One for My Baby” unlike anything he’d done before.  Please stand clear of the bar.

Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer wrote the song especially for Astaire, though it’s been recorded many times by others, included several times by Frank Sinatra.  The song, famously, was Bette Midler’s farewell to Johnny Carson, on his next-to-last night hosting “The Tonight Show.”

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The Sky’s the Limit  (1942)
Edward H. Griffith, director
Frank Fenton, Lynn Root, writers
“One for My Baby (and One More for the Road)”
Harold Arlen, music; Johnny Mercer, lyrics
Fred Astaire, choreographer

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Quote of note
“If Fred Astaire is the Cary Grant of dance, I’m the Marlon Brando.”
—Gene Kelly

…58…59…60.

Tuesday Minute
No. 148 | August 17, 2010

Hoofing It

Our theme this week
The incomparable Fred Astaire

Featured this week (theme introduction)
Monday         —   “Cheek to Cheek” / Top Hat (1935)

“Begin the Beguine”

“Begin the Beguine” was one of the most elaborate production numbers of Hollywood’s golden age.  MGM spared no expense for its fourth and final installment in the Broadway Melody series, but the most special of the effects were provided by the two stars, the incomparable Fred Astaire, in his first film after leaving RKO, and the equally extraordinary Eleanor Powell, often considered the finest of female tap dancers, and for good reason.  If you’d like to know why, just watch the clip below.  That may not be the beguine they’re doing, but it’s one hell of a dance.  Powell, by the way, was so good she apparently intimidated Astaire at first.  In his autobiography, Astaire said that she was “in a class by herself.”

Keep an eye on the fellow that joins them at the end of the routine.  That’s future senator of California, George Murphy.  Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger followed his lead, jumping from movies to politics, though  Murphy was likely the only pol ever who could keep step with Astaire and Powell.

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Broadway Melody of 1940 (1940)
Norman Taurog, director
Jack McGowan, Dore Schary (story), Leon Gordon, George Oppenheimer (screenplay), writers
“Begin the Beguine”
Cole Porter, words and music
Bobby Connolly, Albertina Rasch, choreographers
Fred Astaire & Eleanor Powell

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Quote of note
“You know, you can wait and hope, but I’ll tell you:  you’ll never see the likes of this again.”
—Frank Sinatra, on the tap dancing of Fred Astaire and Eleanor Powell, That’s Entertainment! (1974)

…58…59…60.

Monday Minute
No. 147 | August 16, 2010

Hoofing It

“Can’t sing.  Can’t act.  Balding.  Can dance a little.”  Whoever wrote those legendary words about a certain Hollywood hopeful has long been forgotten.  Fred Astaire, whose screen test prompted the report, is, on the other hand, a name you may remember.

In fact, the name needs no introduction.  Let’s get right to it then.  Shall we dance?

Our theme this week
The incomparable Fred Astaire

“Cheek to Cheek”

Top Hat is the quintessential Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers film.  It was Astaire’s fourth film and his fourth with Rogers, who was twelve years his junior but had been making movies for half a decade before their propitious pairing.  They made ten films altogether, nine of them musicals, and sprinkled among them some of the most magical moments of movie history.  Their films include The Gay Divorcee, Roberta, Swing Time, and Shall We Dance.  Not a bad career—and most of their work together was squeezed into a few short years during the ’30s.

In Top Hat, Astaire plays a dancer who falls for Dale, a hotel guest played by Rogers.  She mistakes him for the husband of a friend—if not, they’d have had a much shorter movie—and lucky for us, she holds him off as he chases her from London to Venice.  The film features several celebrated tunes, including “Isn’t It a Lovely Day?” (sung during a pouring rainstorm, of course) and “Top Hat, White Tie and Tails.”  That describes Astaire’s outfit in this and other films, as he unfailingly brought class to the affair.  If that seems out of place for the middle of the Depression, that was the point.  Audiences had a chance, for a couple of hours, to sit in the dark and forget their troubles.  (At least one future filmmaker was paying attention.)

By the time we get to “Cheek to Cheek,” no one’s holding anyone off any longer.  (”Well, if Madge doesn’t care, I certainly don’t.”)  Irving Berlin wrote the song in a single day.  Fred and Ginger made it immortal.

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Top Hat (1935)
Mark Sandrich, director
Allan Scott, Dwight Taylor, writers
“Cheek to Cheek”
Irving Berlin, words & music
Fred Astaire, Hermes Pan, choreographers
Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers

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Quote of note
“He gives her class and she gives him sex.”
—Katharine Hepburn, on Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers

…58…59…60.