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.