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.

---

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

---

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.

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.

---

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

---

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

…58…59…60.