Broadway Melody of 1940 (Norman Taurog, 1940)

 

Eleanor Powell and Fred Astaire in Broadway Melody of 1940

Cast: Fred Astaire, Eleanor Powell, George Murphy, Frank Morgan, Ian Hunter, Florence Rice, Lynne Carver, Ann Morriss, Trixie Firschke. Screenplay: Leon Gordon, George Oppenheimer, Jack McGowan, Dore Schary. Cinematography: Joseph Ruttenberg, Oliver T. Marsh. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: Blanche Sewell. Music: George Bassman, George Stoll; songs by Cole Porter. 

"Glorious Technicolor," as a song in Silk Stockings (Rouben Mamoulian, 1957) dubs it, was the hallmark of MGM's musicals, starting with The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939). The fourth and final iteration of MGM's series that started with the Oscar-winning (but now laughably antique) The Broadway Melody (Harry Beaumont, 1929) and continued with Broadway Melody of 1936 (Roy Del Ruth, 1935) and Broadway Melody of 1938 (Del Ruth, 1937) was supposed to be in color, but uncertainty about the European market where war was breaking out caused the studio to cut back on the budget. But who needs Technicolor when you have talent like Cole Porter, Fred Astaire, and Eleanor Powell, especially in the big shiny black set for the finale, with Astaire and Powell dancing to "Begin the Beguine"? We probably won't see the likes of that again ever. For that matter, who needs a plot? Most movie musical screenplays were just threads to string the gems on, and the one for Broadway Melody of 1940 is no exception. Astaire and George Murphy play a down-and-out dance team, one of whom gets a chance at the big time, performing with Powell in a new Broadway show. The problem is that there's a mixup about which one is owed the big break. Astaire's character is the one picked by the talent-scouting producer (Frank Morgan), but through the kind of mishap that mis-happens only in the movies, the co-producer (Ian Hunter) thinks that Murphy's character is the one he's chosen. Both guys fall in love with Powell's character, of course, and everything has to be sorted out. Norman Taurog had a good hand with this sort of comedy, thankfully, and Morgan's befuddlement, which also involves an ermine cape that he lends his dates, is moderately amusing. The only flaw is that the movie follows the tradition of its predecessors in inserting vaudeville-style specialty acts between the musical numbers, so we endure extended routines by a juggler and a comic soprano before Astaire, Powell, and Murphy can sing and dance again. This was the only teaming of Astaire and Powell, and each was reportedly intimidated by the other. Powell's dance style was more athletic and acrobatic than Astaire's, and it's demonstrated spectacularly in her solo number "All Ashore," but any fears that their styles might not mesh were put to rest by their duets to "I Concentrate on You" and "Begin the Beguine." Murphy gets shown up by both, and he looks ridiculous dancing on tippy-toes in the "Between You and Me" duet with Powell, which may be why he quit hoofing and went into politics.

Roberta (William A. Seiter, 1935)

Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire in Roberta

Cast: Irene Dunne, Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Randolph Scott, Helen Westley, Claire Dodd, Victor Varconi, Luis Alberni, Ferdinand Munier, Torben Meyer, Adrian Rosley, Bodil Rosing. Screenplay: Jane Murfin, Sam Mintz, Allan Scott, Glenn Tryon, based on a play by Otto A. Harbach and a novel by Alice Duer Miller. Cinematography: Edward Cronjager. Art direction: Van Nest Polglase, Carroll Clark. Film editing: William Hamilton. Music: Jerome Kern, Max Steiner.

If Roberta is less well-known than most of the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movies, it's partly because it was out of circulation for a long time after 1945, when MGM bought up the rights to the film and the Broadway musical on which it was based, planning to remake it in Technicolor as a vehicle for Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra. That plan fell through, and the actual remake, Lovely to Look At (Mervyn LeRoy, 1952) with Kathryn Grayson, Howard Keel, Red Skelton, and Marge and Gower Champion, is nothing special. But MGM's hold on the property meant that, unlike the other Astaire-Rogers films, it didn't show up on television until the 1970s. But it was also a kind of throwback to the first of their movies, Flying Down to Rio (Thornton Freeland, 1933), in that they weren't the top-billed stars of Roberta, and their plot is secondary to that of the star, Irene Dunne, and her leading man, Randolph Scott. It doesn't matter much: What we remember from the film are the great Astaire-Rogers dance numbers, "I'll Be Hard to Handle," "I Won't Dance," and the reprises of "Lovely to Look At" and "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes." Scott's inability to sing resulted in the big number for his character in the Broadway version, "You're Devastating," being cut from the song score of the movie. "I Won't Dance" was brought in from another Jerome Kern musical, and Kern and Jimmy McHugh composed that fashion-show/beauty-pageant classic "Lovely to Look At," with lyrics by Dorothy Fields, for the film, earning Roberta its only Oscar nomination. Except when Astaire and Rogers are doing their magic, the film is a little draggy, and Dunne and Scott strike no sparks. Look for a blond Lucille Ball, draped in a feathery wrap, as one of the models in the fashion show.

Dancing Lady (Robert Z. Leonard, 1933)

Dancing Lady (Robert Z. Leonard, 1933)

Cast: Joan Crawford, Clark Gable, Franchot Tone, Fred Astaire, Ted Healy, Moe Howard, Curly Howard, Larry Fine, Robert Benchley, Arthur Jarrett, May Robson, Nelson Eddy. Screenplay: Allen Rivkin, P.J. Wolfson. Cinematography: Oliver T. Marsh. Art direction: Merrill Pye. Film editing: Margaret Booth. Music: Maurice De Packh, Louis Silvers.

Broadway Melody of 1940 (Norman Taurog, 1940)

Broadway Melody of 1940 (Norman Taurog, 1940)

Cast: Fred Astaire, Eleanor Powell, George Murphy, Frank Morgan, Ian Hunter, Florence Rice. Screenplay: Leon Gordon, George Oppenheimer, Jack McGowan, Dore Schary. Cinematography: Oliver T. Marsh, Joseph Ruttenberg. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: Blanche Sewell. Songs: Cole Porter.

Shall We Dance (Mark Sandrich, 1937)

This was the seventh teaming of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, and the fatigue is beginning to show, despite a score by George Gershwin and songs with his brother Ira. Shall We Dance is marred by a tired script -- credited to Allan Scott and Ernest Pagano -- that reworks the familiar pattern: The Astaire and Rogers characters meet cute, feel an attraction to each other that they resist, find themselves in farcical misunderstandings, and several spats, songs, and dances later assure themselves that they are in love. In this one, Astaire plays a faux-Russian ballet dancer called Petrov -- he's actually Pete Peters from Philadelphia, Pa. -- who really wants to be a tap dancer. The idea of Astaire as a danseur noble is absurd from the start, and Astaire knew it -- he had turned down the lead in the 1936 Broadway production of the Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart musical On Your Toes, which like Shall We Dance centers on a production that combines ballet with Broadway-style dance. Gershwin, too, was not entirely happy about the idea of composing ballet music, but both men were eventually persuaded to go along with the idea. The plot gimmick is that Peters/Petrov has fallen for tap dancer Linda Keene, who initially spurns him, and through a series of mishaps the rumor gets started that the two are secretly married. After much ado, they really get married so she can divorce him and put a stop to the rumors, but by then they of course have really fallen in love. One problem is that, unlike the best Astaire-Rogers films, Top Hat (Mark Sandrich, 1935) and Swing Time (George Stevens, 1936), the songs in Shall We Dance don't grow organically out of the screenplay. They have to be wedged in, like Astaire's number "Slap That Bass," which takes place in the engine room of the ocean liner on which Petrov and Linda are traveling -- one of the oddest of the Big White Sets for which the Astaire-Rogers musicals were famous: It's the cleanest engine room ever seen. The biggest Astaire-Rogers dance duet in the film is "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off," which is performed on roller skates in a park when Petrov and Linda try to evade pursuing reporters; it, too, seems designed more to get Astaire and Rogers on skates than to contribute to the plot. On the other hand, there's an obvious missed opportunity for a romantic duet to the Oscar-nominated song "They Can't Take That Away From Me," which Astaire sings to Rogers, but he doesn't follow through by dancing with her. He does dance to a few bars of the song when it's reprised later in the film, but his partner is Harriet Hoctor, a dancer whose specialty was a deep back-bend that she performed while en pointe. There's a sequence in which Hoctor does her thing while dancing backward toward the camera, which she is facing, that's flat-out creepy. Astaire-Rogers film regulars Edward Everett Horton and Eric Blore are on hand to do their usual fussbudget routines. Blore's bit in which he tries to tell Horton over the phone that he's been arrested and is at the Susquehanna Street Jail, constantly being interrupted in his attempts to spell "Susquehanna," is the film's funniest moment.

The Gay Divorcee (Mark Sandrich, 1934)

Obviously, The Gay Divorcee wouldn't pass muster as the title for a heterosexual romantic comedy today, but the film's producers had to jump a few hurdles even in 1934, when the Hays Office censors were about to yield to the much stricter Production Code. The title of the Broadway musical on which the movie was based was Gay Divorce, and Catholic censors were strictly opposed to the idea that divorce could be anything other than a sin. However, assuming that she'd done her penance, a divorcee could be gay (in the older sense), just as Franz Lehár's old operetta asserted that a widow could be merry. This was the first teaming of Fred Astaire with Ginger Rogers in which they were the stars: They had been supporting players in their previous film, Flying Down to Rio (Thornton Freeland and George Nicholls Jr., 1933), and their dance numbers had caused such a sensation that RKO was eager to craft a musical around them. Pandro S. Berman, head of production at the studio, purchased the rights to Gay Divorce, in which Astaire had been the star on Broadway, and put a team of writers to work revising the musical's book by Dwight Taylor. The Broadway version had a score by Cole Porter, but all but one of the songs were jettisoned for the film. That song was the best, however: "Night and Day," which gave the stars their first great fall-in-love pas de deux. The screenplay, by many studio hands, takes the farcical premise of the play: Mimi Glossop (Rogers), seeks a divorce from her husand, and since they're in England, where the only justification for divorce is adultery, she, with the help of her Aunt Hortense (Alice Brady) and the lawyer Egbert Fitzgerald (Edward Everett Horton), arranges to be caught in a hotel room with a professional co-respondent, Rodolfo Tonetti (Erik Rhodes, who also played the role on Broadway). Meanwhile, however, she has fallen in love with Guy Holden (Astaire), an American she has just met -- and, of course, met cute. Through a sequence of screwball accidents, she winds up thinking that he's the co-respondent, and is disgusted that he should have such a sordid job. Eventually, everything is sorted out with the help of a hotel waiter (Eric Blore, also from the Broadway cast). In the middle of everything, there's a 20-minute-long production number centered on the film's big song, "The Continental," for which composer Con Conrad and lyricist Herb Magidson won the first Oscar ever given for a song written for a movie. The Gay Divorcee would rank with the best Astaire-Rogers films if it had a better score. Aside from "Night and Day," the rest are mostly forgettable novelty numbers, like "Let's K-nock K-nees," which is performed by a then-unknown Betty Grable with Horton and a gang of chorus members. Still, the movie lifted my spirits on Inauguration Night the way it must have soothed people's feelings during the Depression.

Funny Face (Stanley Donen, 1957)

Is there anything better than Astaire singing Gershwin? And in Funny Face he sings five Gershwin songs with his impeccable phrasing and musicianship, which in itself would be enough to make this one of the great film musicals. Okay, maybe it's not up there with the best of the Astaire-Rogers films or The Band Wagon (Vincente Minnelli, 1953), but it's close enough. And he dances, too, with the same grace and vitality at the age of 58 as when he was much, much younger, especially in his great solo performance of "Let's Kiss and Make Up" and his duet with Kay Thompson on "Clap Yo' Hands." So Audrey Hepburn isn't in the same league as Ginger Rogers or Cyd Charisse as a dance partner, but she had studied ballet when she was much younger and her solo number parodying modern dance moves is one of the film's highlights. As a singer, she's a good actress, by which I mean that her big solo number, "How Long Has This Been Going On?", is memorable because of the way she sells the concept of innocence awakening to ecstasy, greatly aided by a big yellow hat and Ray June's gorgeous color cinematography. It's clear that she had a small, untrained singing voice, which is why Marni Nixon had to be called in to dub her in My Fair Lady (George Cukor, 1964), a role that makes demands she probably couldn't have met vocally. There are those who are bothered by the nearly 30-year age discrepancy between Astaire and Hepburn, but she spent much of her career playing opposite much older men like Humphrey Bogart, Gary Cooper, and Cary Grant -- in her prime in the 1950s and early '60s, there were very few leading men her age who could match her star power. Some critics also object to the film's mockery of French intellectuals -- Pauline Kael calls the lecherous philosopher played by Michel Auclair "a sour idea" -- but that's probably asking too much of the conventions of romantic comedy. The screenplay is by Leonard Gershe, but the real heroes of the film are Astaire, Hepburn, Thompson, June, Roger Edens in his dual role as producer and composer, costume designers Edith Head and Hubert de Givenchy, photographer Richard Avedon as "visual consultant," and most of all Stanley Donen, who not only directed but shared choreography duties with Astaire and Eugene Loring.

Follow the Fleet (Mark Sandrich, 1936)

If Swing Time, as I suggested yesterday, has too little plot, then Follow the Fleet has a bit too much. Dwight Taylor and Allan Scott based their screenplay on a 1922 Broadway play, Shore Leave, by Hubert Osborne, which later became a musical, Hit the Deck. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers of course spark real heat when they're dancing together: As the remark attributed to Katharine Hepburn about the team says, she made him sexy and he made her classy. But I don't find them terribly convincing as a romantic pair when they're not singing and dancing together, and this criticism was not uncommon even in their heyday. Which may be why RKO decided to try to spice things up by creating a parallel romantic team in Follow the Fleet, casting Randolph Scott and Harriet Hilliard as the lovers whose problems echo those of Astaire and Rogers. The trouble is, Scott and Hilliard generate much less chemistry than the lead couple. Scott had always been a sort of second-string Gary Cooper, but without Cooper's charm or acting ability, and Hilliard was best known as a singer with her husband Ozzie Nelson's band when she was signed for this film, her first feature. She sings, rather ineffectively, two of the lesser-known of the seven Irving Berlin songs in the score, "Get Thee Behind Me, Satan" and "But Where Are You?" Follow the Fleet did nothing for her film career. It wasn't until she teamed with Ozzie for the radio series The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet in 1944, and later with their two sons, David and Ricky, for the long-running TV series of the same name, that she became really famous. Fame was in store, however, for several other members of the cast: Betty Grable and a blond Lucille Ball have small parts in the film, and Tony Martin, one of the sailors backing up Astaire, would later star in the film version of Hit the Deck (Roy Rowland, 1955), bringing Hollywood's use of Osborne's play full circle. As for Astaire and Rogers, Follow the Fleet contains two of their most memorable numbers. They do a slapstick dance routine to "I'm Putting All My Eggs in One Basket" that shows Rogers's great gift for physical comedy to full advantage. And then there's  "Let's Face the Music and Dance," which is one of their most balletic routines. Astaire does some remarkable footwork and Rogers is clad in an amazing dress that, thanks to weights in the sleeves and hem, swirls around her hypnotically. Once or twice, to be sure, you can see Astaire try to avoid getting swacked by her sleeves. (The designer credited with "gowns" is Bernard Newman.) At the end of this sublime routine, Astaire and Rogers slowly make their way off-stage and then suddenly exit with a breathtakingly unanticipated strut. But why try to describe it?

Swing Time (George Stevens, 1936)

The plot of a Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers is typically a thread on which the gems (the songs and dances) are strung, and Swing Time is no exception. The screenplay by Howard Lindsay and Allan Scott seems to exist largely to provide opportunities for Astaire and Rogers to open their mouths, the better to sing with, or to find places to dance. For those who care, it's the one in which Astaire plays a gambler named Lucky Garnett, who is late for his wedding to Margaret Watson (Betty Furness), so her father calls it off and says that if Lucky can make $25,000, he can come back to claim her hand. So off he goes to New York, accompanied by his friend Pop Cardetti (Victor Moore), where he falls for Penny Carroll (Rogers), a dance teacher. And so on.... That anything this silly remains watchable 80 years later is the consequence of the unsurpassed artistry of Astaire and Rogers, the dance direction of Hermes Pan, the comic support of Moore, Helen Broderick, and Eric Blore, and six songs by Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields. Rogers does more than her usual share of the singing in this one, taking the lead on both "Pick Yourself Up" and "A Fine Romance," but as usual it's Astaire's peerless phrasing that carries the songs, especially the Oscar-winning "The Way You Look Tonight," which is wittily staged when Rogers enters the room having lathered her hair with shampoo but not yet rinsed it out. The dance highlight is probably "Never Gonna Dance," the climactic number when Lucky and Penny each think they're doomed to marry someone else, but Astaire's solo, "Bojangles of Harlem," a tribute to the great Bill Robinson, is also superb -- as long as you're not offended by the fact that Astaire does it in blackface. (To my mind, the reverence paid to Robinson outweighs the minstrelsy, but only slightly.) Astaire always insisted that dance sequences be done in long takes, which led to 47 reprises of  "Never Gonna Dance" during the filming before a take that completely satisfied Astaire was achieved -- at the expense, it is said, of Rogers's feet, which began to bleed. This was the only film role of any consequence for Furness, whose chief claim to fame was that she opened countless refrigerator doors as the TV commercial spokesperson for Westinghouse in the 1950s.