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.