Fred & Ginger:
The Classic Astaire-Rogers Musicals of the 1930s
From July 4 through 30, the Gene Siskel Film Center presents “Fred & Ginger: The Classic Astaire-Rogers Musicals of the 1930s.” Included are eight of the couple’s collaborations from their heyday at the RKO studio. Also being shown is A DAMSEL IN DISTRESS, essentially an Astaire-Rogers movie without Rogers.
The movie musical, long in decline, has shown flickering signs of life in recent years. More dramatically, the success of TV shows like “Dancing with the Stars” and “So You Think You Can Dance” has put the spotlight again on ballroom dancing--aka social dancing or, more recently, DanceSport. By whatever name, any consideration of this phenomenon must inevitably lead back to Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, indisputably the greatest dancing couple in the history of movies. Although more restrained in costume and acrobatic exertion than their contemporary counterparts, Fred & Ginger still represent the epitome of dance as an expression of romantic feeling.
Fred Astaire, an aging stage dancer recently separated from his more admired partner/sister Adele, and Ginger Rogers, a young contract actress best known for her supporting roles in Busby Berkeley musicals, were teamed by RKO as the secondary leads in FLYING DOWN TO RIO (1933). Their mutually enhancing chemistry (“He gave her class, and she gave him sex” is an oft-quoted assessment attributed to Katharine Hepburn) was immediately apparent to movie audiences. Astaire and Rogers eclipsed the nominal stars of RIO, and they were reunited in eight more films whose initial popularity is credited with pulling RKO out of near-bankruptcy in the mid-1930s. As the profits from their musicals declined in the late 1930s, Astaire and Rogers began seeking projects apart from each other. Their partnership dissolved in 1939, although they worked together one more time, in MGM’s THE BARKLEYS OF BROADWAY (1949).
Their earliest films together are fairly risqué, but the bulk of the Astaire-Rogers musicals fall into the so-called post-Code era, when Hollywood began more strictly enforcing its self-imposed censorship system in order to avoid government regulation. Of course, sex did not disappear from American movies after 1934. It merely migrated into other dimensions, and the Astaire-Rogers musicals demonstrated how sexuality could still flourish in more subtle and sublimated forms.
In the typical Astaire-Rogers plot, Fred instantly falls for Ginger, but a silly misunderstanding (a misinterpreted remark, a mistaken identity) stokes her hostility until the final moments. The couple’s dances, often depicting Ginger’s journey from resistance to surrender, are Fred’s main weapon in winning her over, but it would be a mistake to read this process as simple sexual conquest. As Ginger’s barely suppressed amusement makes clear, the two pre-ordained partners approach their respective roles of hot-to-trot and hard-to-get with playful irony, collaborating to prolong and intensify a deliciously elegant erotic game.
Although Fred & Ginger remain legendary, the movies in which they appeared are sometimes undervalued. There is more to an Astaire-Rogers musical than Astaire and Rogers. The films’ many additional virtues include the dazzling deco sets designed by Carroll Clark; the slick syncopated style of the series’ most frequent director, Mark Sandrich; the witty screenwriting of Allan Scott and Dwight Taylor; the comic support supplied by such fabulously fey performers as Edward Everett Horton and Eric Blore; and, above all, the glorious music from the cream of the era’s composers: Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Cole Porter. In the period 1934-1938, these elements came together to produce a series of consistently entertaining confections whose airy Apollonian grace forms a counterpoint to the Dionysian thunder of Busby Berkeley, Astaire’s most important predecessor in the field of movie dance direction.
Special thanks to Marilee Womack of Warner Brothers Classics.
-- Martin Rubin
FLYING DOWN TO RIO
1933, Thornton Freeland, USA, 89 min.
With Gene Raymond, Dolores Del Rio
Kooky, kinky, and enormous fun, this pre-Code tropical musical marks the momentous first pairing of Astaire and Rogers. Nominal leads Raymond, as a bandleader who likes to fly, and Del Rio, as a betrothed Brazilian beauty, are charming enough (especially in a scene where their decorous outer selves appear alongside their randy alter egos), but they are inevitably upstaged by up-and-coming Fred & Ginger as the band’s singing/dancing stars. The spectacularly sexy “The Carioca” (in which the dancers read each other’s lustful thoughts) is topped by the airborne extravaganza of the title-tune finale. 35mm. (MR)
Friday, July 11, 6:15 pm
Monday, July 14, 8:00 pm
THE GAY DIVORCEE
1934, Mark Sandrich, USA, 107 min.
With Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers
Astaire & Rogers’s first starring vehicle, THE GAY DIVORCEE builds its farcical plot on the simple but hilarious ploy of having Ginger mistake Fred for the gigolo who has been hired to facilitate her divorce. “The Continental,” one of their most celebrated numbers, provides an elaborate climax, but it can’t match the sensual simplicity of “Night and Day”--in no other musical number has the idea of dance as a sublimated form of sex been so stunningly realized. 35mm. (MR)
Friday, July 4, 3:00 pm
Monday, July 7, 7:45 pm
ROBERTA
1935, William A. Seiter, USA, 106 min.
With Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Irene Dunne
One of the least known Astaire-Rogers musicals, ROBERTA is the film that really cemented them as a team, according to Arlene Croce in her definitive study of the duo. The plot takes a nostalgic look at European gentry (with Russian princess Dunne as the brains behind a Paris fashion salon) while Fred and Ginger, as two transplanted Indianans, let loose with American spontaneity. The Jerome Kern score includes “I Won’t Dance,” “Yesterdays,” and “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” Fred & Ginger’s “impromptu” dance at the end of “I’ll Be Hard to Handle” is a supreme example of their matchless rapport. 35mm. (BS)
Sunday, July 27, 4:30 pm
Wednesday, July 30, 6:00 pm
TOP HAT
1935, Mark Sandrich, USA, 101 min.
With Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers
There is no clear-cut classic among the Astaire-Rogers musicals--all are mostly marvelous with crucial flaws--but TOP HAT perhaps comes the closest. Scored by Irving Berlin, the film’s most famous number is “Top Hat, White Tie and Tails,” featuring fancy canework among Fred and a chorus of gents, but the heart of TOP HAT is its two great romantic duets, “Isn’t This a Lovely Day (to Be Caught in the Rain)?” and “Cheek to Cheek,” the first set on a London bandstand during a thunderstorm, the second beside the sparkling canals of RKO’s Art Deco version of Venice. 35mm. (MR)
Sunday, July 6, 5:15 pm
Tuesday, July 8, 6:00 pm
FOLLOW THE FLEET
1936, Mark Sandrich, USA, 110 min.
With Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Randolph Scott
The ambience is relatively more macho and proletarian in this jaunty tale of a swabbie (Astaire) who finds his former dance partner (Rogers) in a dime-a-dance hall and helps her sister (Harriet Hilliard, later Ozzie Nelson’s spouse) refurbish a rusty schooner. The Irving Berlin tunes include “We Saw the Sea,” “I’d Rather Lead a Band,” and “Let Yourself Go.” The top dance numbers are the comic gem “I’m Putting All My Eggs in One Basket” and the elegant, atypically serious “Let’s Face the Music and Dance.” 35mm. (MR)
Sunday, July 20, 3:00 pm
Thursday, July 24, 8:15 pm
SWING TIME
1936, George Stevens, USA, 103 min.
With Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Victor Moore
Director George Stevens’s romantic style, lush with glittering lights and falling snowflakes, has made SWING TIME the favorite in the series for many fans. The plot, even more inconsequential than usual, faces Fred with choices between dancing and gambling, and between rich fiancée Betty Furness and dance partner Ginger. The Jerome Kern score gives the duo a great elegant number (“Waltz in Swing Time”) and a great comic one (“A Fine Romance”), as well as a sensational solo for Astaire (the Bill Robinson tribute, “Bojangles of Harlem”). 35mm. (MR)
Friday, July 18, 6:00 pm
Wednesday, July 23, 8:30 pm
SHALL WE DANCE
1937, Mark Sandrich, USA, 109 min.
With Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers
Despite a clunky ballet finale, SHALL WE DANCE is perhaps the most stylish of the Astaire-Rogers movies: Sandrich’s direction was never snazzier, supporting sissies Horton and Blore were never funnier, Gershwin’s music was never lovelier (“They All Laughed,” “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off,” “They Can’t Take That Away from Me”), and Astaire’s dancing was never more awesome--his riffing to engine-room pistons in “Slap That Bass” is a career highpoint. The plot casts Fred as a bogus Russian ballet maestro whose love for Broadway star Ginger is hampered by scandal-sheet publicity. 35mm. (MR)
Sunday, July 13, 3:00 pm
Wednesday, July 16, 8:00 pm
A DAMSEL IN DISTRESS
1937, George Stevens, USA, 98 min.
With Fred Astaire, Joan Fontaine, Burns & Allen
Rogers wanted to step out from under taskmaster Astaire’s shadow and show her stuff in non-musicals such as STAGE DOOR and VIVACIOUS LADY, so he soldiered on in this Ginger-less outing that otherwise retains many of the elements of the series. The story, adapted by P.G. Wodehouse from his novel, concerns an American stage star (Astaire) whose lover-boy image impairs his romance with a demure British damsel (Fontaine). The Gershwin score includes “A Foggy Day” and “Nice Work If You Can Get It.” The funhouse-set “Stiff Upper Lip” number won an Academy Award; just as spectacular is Astaire’s drum-kicking finale. 35mm. (MR)
Friday, July 25, 6:00 pm
Monday, July 28, 8:15 pm
CAREFREE
1938, Mark Sandrich, USA, 83 min.
With Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Ralph Bellamy
Astaire and Rogers reunited onscreen after a fifteen-month separation, but the series was starting to move in new directions. The rarely shown CAREFREE is as much a screwball comedy as a musical (John Mueller, in his monumental study “Astaire Dances,” calls the screenplay “funny and well knit...the most lucid and coherent in the Astaire-Rogers series”). For the first time, Fred’s character is not a professional dancer; he plays a psychiatrist whom lovestruck patient Ginger strings along by pretending to have multiple phobias. The Irving Berlin-scored numbers include the slow-motion “I Used to Be Color Blind” and the Svengaliesque “Change Partners.” 35mm. (MR)