Movie of the Week XI

Top Hat (1935)

I am in the city with the Fred and Ginger Dancing House, so I thought it was time for a Fred and Ginger movie.

Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire made ten movies together, nine at RKO studios in the 1930s and a final film, The Barkleys of Broadway, at MGM in 1949. I have picked Top Hat since it is my favorite. Though, honestly, it is hard to keep their movies straight. Besides Flying Down to Rio (1933) in which the pair are not the featured couple and only appear infrequently, The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle (1939), a biopic about the famous dance team, and The Barkleys of Broadway, their movies blend together into a series of fantastic, almost impossibly wonderful dances held together by silly, redundant plots. I am extremely gullible and ready to be entertained, so I will go a long way with a movie, but the Astaire-Rogers films can stretch even my loose limits. The films are filled with Shakespearean mistaken identities and simple misunderstandings that could be cleared up quite easily if people would just talk to each other for a few seconds. But instead they run around, or dance around, in confused love or mistaken anger. The confusion is certainly comical and the anger is a very light, cheerful type, but still. It frustrates me sometimes.

Now that I have said that, let me modify my criticism. Audiences then did not watch the movies for the plot, and audiences now don't either. We watch them for the dancing and the costumes and the sets. The plot is there just to get Fred and Ginger in beautiful clothes on a beautiful dance floor so they can do their beautiful thing. (It is easier for me to keep track of the movies by the dances in each one and the dresses Ginger wears than by the plots.)

The dances are magical--even if you don't like dancing you will probably still enjoy watching these two dance. They make it look effortless and romantic and the dances always tell a story. It is either a story of dislike turning into like (early in the movies), or like into love (a little later), then disappointment and sadness that the love cannot be (even later), and finally celebrating the impossible love becoming possible (the end.) Ginger Rogers is especially brilliant at using the dance to express emotion and forward the narrative. Someone said that women dreamed of dancing with Fred Astaire because Ginger Rogers made it look like the most thrilling and wonderful thing ever. That is very true.

Fred Astaire is well known for being a perfectionist who would rehearse and rehearse and then shoot take after take until he was satisfied. There are stories of Rogers' feet bleeding inside her dancing shoes and the costume people scrambling to find another pair after the hours and hours of dancing. Most of their dances are filmed in just a few shots; there are no quick edits as in most modern films. So they might dance without a cut for two or three or four minutes. Which means that the first 3 minutes and thirty seconds might be perfect but then they make a tiny mistake and have to start all over again. No wonder Ginger's feet bled...

Anyway, point is, the dancing is fabulous.

So why did I choose Top Hat? I think it is fun. Silly but fun. Fred, who plays a professional dancer (shock) named Jerry, dances in his hotel room at night and his tapping wakes up Ginger, a model named Dale, who is in the room below. She fusses at him and he falls in love. Astaire and Rogers' perennial sidekicks, Edward Everett Horton and Helen Broderick, play a married couple, the Hardwicks. Mr. Hardwick is producing Jerry's show, and Mrs. Hardwick is a friend of Dale's. (Though Dale and Jerry are strangers, hmmm....)Well, Dale mistakes Jerry for Mr. Hardwick, and so she is disgusted by Jerry's persistent attempts to win her. Jerry can't understand why Dale is so hostile. To add to everything else, Mrs. Hardwick keeps encouraging Dale to spend time with Jerry, so Dale thinks that Mrs. Hardwick is trying to push Dale into an affair with her husband! Confused yet? Because I haven't even gotten into the side story of Dale and her Italian fashion designer friend, Beddini. He pays Dale to wear his gowns to fancy hotels and dinners. Their relationship borders on an indecent sort of "kept woman" arrangement but I guess it is okay. Also, Beddini loves Dale. Somehow everyone ends up in Venice. Here they all are. The Hardwicks, their comedic butler, Eric Blore (who is also in loads of these movies), Dale, Jerry, and Beddini.

The dances and songs (Irving Berlin) in this one are especially great, and I love the end of the movie because it takes place on the Lido in Venice. Although it is a highly stylized Venice that looks nothing like the Lido. But they spend the last 15 or so minutes of the movie in a huge production number dance sequence called "The Piccolino" twirling about this crazy stage. (The next images are from the trailer.)

The look of the film is very typical for the Astaire-Rogers movies and 1930s musicals in general. Highly stylized with no attempt at reproducing reality. Huge, shiny white monsters of sets (known as the "Big White Set" since they were so ubiquitous) with staircases going nowhere and crazy designs on the floor with lots of mirrors and other art deco-y touches.

See what I mean?

Now I think we are more obsessed with movies reproducing reality. We want our historical films to be "accurate," or at least to be told that someone did a little research, and we like special effects to look "real." There is no attempt in these movies to be "real." People don't dance and sing like Fred and Ginger in real life, and there aren't places like the places they inhabit in real life. And that is part of what makes the movies magical. And also a little dated. There, I said it. I can't help comparing the Astaire-Rogers movies with the comedies of the same decade that I am so fond of. Those movies, many of which I have written about on this blog, seem fresh, quick, clever, sharp, and vibrant so many decades later. They seem so modern. I don't think the same can be said for Top Hat and the others, though.

Famous scene: the "Cheek to Cheek" dance. It is famous for a few reasons. The song is famous (so many of today's standards appeared in these movies), the dance is famous, and the dress is famous.

Ginger Rogers reportedly requested a pale blue dress all covered in ostrich feathers. She got it.

But as soon as they started dancing the feathers started flying. They tried take after take but the feathers shot out of the dress every time Ginger moved, and stuck to Fred's tuxedo and covered the floor. Fred said of the dress and the dancing, "It was like a chicken being attacked by a coyote." Ginger was upset, Fred was upset, the crew was upset. Finally, every single feather was re-sown and reinforced so that the next day they could shoot the dance without it looking like a chicken massacre. Though if you watch closely you can see the odd feather floating off the dress.

Fred Astaire nicknamed Ginger Rogers "Feathers," after this incident, and in Easter Parade (1948) Judy Garland and Fred Astaire parody the episode--Garland wears a dress trimmed in ostrich feathers for a performance. The feathers fly off and get into Astaire's mouth and in his face until he can barely see or dance.

Isn't Fred Astaire funny looking? There is a possibly apocryphal story about Fred Astaire's first screen test in Hollywood. The producer's conclusion was something like this: "Can't sing. Can't act. Going Bald. Can dance a little." I hope it is true, and if it isn't it still makes for a great story.

Another possibly true tidbit: Katharine Hepburn said about Fred and Ginger: "He gives her class, and she gives him sex." Ha. He wasn't the hunky dancer like Gene Kelly or Gower Champion, or Tommy Rall, my fave. But what talent! Pretty amazing.

I am a big fan of Ginger. One of my favorite all-time quotes is "Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, but she did it backwards and in high heels." Perfect. Although she is best known for being one of the Astaire-Rogers team, she was an excellent actress who appeared in loads of non-dancing movies.

I like Stage Door (1937), Bachelor Mother (1939), Kitty Foyle (1940), Roxie Hart (1942) (a version of Chicago), and the silly The Major and the Minor (1942) and Monkey Business (1952) with Cary Grant and Marilyn Monroe. Rogers made 73 movies, and won the Best Actress Oscar for Kitty Foyle (1940). So dancing with Astaire was just a small part of her career, really.

There is so much to say about Fred and Ginger and their movies! I feel like I have just scratched the surface...A nice thing about their movies is that they are all available on DVD and there are some excellent boxed sets out there with all of their films together. So if you are interested...