The Art of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers

Back in the days when Kenneth Branagh was regarded as an art-house director he made a musical version of Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost. The play was set in the 1940s and blended musical numbers from the period with the rich Elizabethan love poetry. I’m not a fan of playing Shakespeare in settings significantly later than his own period, but here it worked. The Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Jerome Kern and George Gershwin songs blended superbly with the Shakespearean verse, as did the pastiche of musical numbers in the style of the period.

All of which tells us a lot about the Astaire–Rogers films Branagh evoked so skilfully. Fortunately all the films they made at RKO between 1933 and 1939 have been released on DVD complete with some excellent commentaries, most notably by Richard Mueller, author of the definitive Astaire Dancing: The Musical Films of Fred Astaire, as well as archival interviews with the choreographer Hermes Pan, who worked with Astaire on seventeen of his films including all the Astaire–Rogers collaborations.

Seeing these films again after viewing Love’s Labour’s Lost made me realise just how similar they were to Shakespearean comedy. The Bard’s witty manipulations of sexual identity, where in the Globe boys played women who disguise themselves as young men, are strikingly similar to the mistaken-identity plots employed by Hollywood screenwriters. The stock comic characters played by supporting actors such as Edward Everett Horton, Eric Blore and Erik Rhodes have rough equivalents in Sir Toby Belch or Andrew Aguecheek in Twelfth Night. Shakespeare’s dialogue is of course infinitely better; but as Branagh demonstrated, the songs by masters like Berlin, Porter, Kern and Gershwin are comparable to Shakespeare’s poetry. Moreover, the relationships between the world of the film musical up on the screen and the regular movie-going audiences of the 1930s were every bit as complex as those existing between the spectators and players in Shakespeare’s playhouses.

I did not, of course, see the Astaire–Rogers movies when they were first released. But as a boy of eight I was taken to a revival of Top Hat at the King’s Theatre, Chatswood, and not long after to a first-release screening of The Barkleys of Broadway (1949), their last film together. Musicals and swashbucklers were a major part of my early movie-going. It was not until I was studying the relationship between the spectators and the players in Shakespeare’s theatre that I came to realise how rich these early experiences really were. In his pioneering study Shakespeare and the Popular Dramatic Tradition, S.L. Bethell argued that Elizabethan spectators were simultaneously aware of the players as performers and the characters in the plays. This was, he insisted, quite different from the willing suspension of disbelief in realistic theatre where audiences react to the actors as characters in the drama. This is also true of certain film genres. But in musicals it was different, especially in the Astaire–Rogers musicals.

My parents belonged to their original audiences and I believe their responses were more or less typical, as may have been my own. After all, film-going in the 1930s and 1940s was a family experience. My mother remembered discovering Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers sometime in 1934 when after a morning’s shopping in Melbourne she went to a matinee of The Gay Divorcee. She knew nothing of Astaire’s background as a star in West End and Broadway musicals or even that he had scored a great success partnering Ginger Rogers in Flying Down to Rio (1933). But like so many others she was entranced by the pair’s dance numbers. My parents were film-goers with regular seats booked every Saturday night at the local cinema. So of course my father was taken to see The Gay Divorcee and they both went to see the rest of the cycle of films Astaire and Rogers made at RKO. So what made these films so special?

Musicals were as old as sound film. Indeed the studios at first made so many musicals and made them so badly that they became box-office poison. A common advertisement in 1930 and 1931 stated, “This is not a musical”.

All that changed with Warner Brothers’ 42nd Street (1932), directed by Lloyd Bacon with the musical numbers staged by Busby Berkeley. It was what came to be known as a “putting on a show” film with “the show’s” success resolving everyone’s problems; but here it was much more realistic. It is the Depression. Many of the showgirls have wealthy protectors. The dance director wears a derby hat and chews a cigar. The director who has lost the money from his earlier successes needs one last hit. There isn’t a lavish apartment in sight, only the bleak rooming houses often seen in the Warner Brothers gangster films. But the “show” moves from a believable recreation of a stage production to the gloriously improbable. The camera seems to go through the legs of the chorus girls as Dick Powell sings “I’m Young and Healthy”. There were top shots of dancers forming intricate patterns, while the actual dancing was drastically simplified.

42nd Street became the prototype for a series of musicals where, however realistic the plot, the show within the show became more and more elaborate, with design, editing and intricate camera movement creating extraordinary lavish spectacles. Rarely did a performer dominate the spectacle in the Busby Berkeley films. The two exceptions are Joan Blondell in the Forgotten Man sequence in Gold Diggers of 1933 and James Cagney and Ruby Keeler in the Shanghai Lil number in Footlight Parade.

The Astaire–Rogers films were a reaction against the Berkeley spectacles. Fred Astaire as his own choreographer was able to insist that the camera cover his routines in one or two set-ups and that he and his partner were filmed full-length with no cuts to feet or close-ups. It was the same as Charlie Chaplin, whose comic routines were usually covered in a single set-up. This of course contradicted the currently fashionable montage theory that insisted the essence of film was in the editing. Not that Astaire or Chaplin worried about film theory. They were doing what was best for their art. As a result, in these dance sequences the viewers’ eyes were drawn into the frame and involved in every nuance of the intricate choreography.

While he was appearing in stage shows like The Gay Divorce (adapted to film as The Gay Divorcee) Astaire decided the dance should further the plot and not be just an embellishment. One of Ginger Rogers’s great strengths was that her acting continued during the routine. Indeed the range of emotions conveyed by both of them was more complex than anything in the dialogue. Astaire once said there was no need for them to kiss because he was making love through the dance. When he finally did kiss Rogers on screen in Carefree it was as the climax to a slow-motion dance routine. His wife claimed Astaire was making up for lost time.

More than with any of his other partners, the tap and balletic routines Fred Astaire and Hermes Pan devised for Rogers were sensuous, even erotic. She had a superb figure that was seen to advantage in the flowing gowns of the period. “Some dresses,” she once said, “make you want to dance in them.” And at this time Rogers had excellent dress sense. This is true of the famous gown she designed herself for the “Cheek to Cheek” number in Top Hat that began to moult during the routine, with the feathers getting into Astaire’s eyes. Even if you are in the know and can spot the feathers on the floor, the couple, and the gown, look stunning. She was right too about the beaded dress she wore for the “Let’s Face the Music and Dance” number in Follow the Fleet (1936). To be sure, one of the heavily weighted sleeves hit Astaire in the face and nearly knocked him out. (He continued dancing and the take is in the film.) But although the dress might have been heavy its movement was a stylish enhancement of the choreography.

As a dancer Astaire was insinuating and elegant in the romantic numbers and could still produce explosive energy for the tap routines. From the beginning Rogers and Astaire had tremendous on-screen rapport both as dancers and as actors in the featherweight plots. As film followed film her dancing became increasingly flexible and soon she was more than holding her own in the tap numbers.

The partnership really began with The Gay Divorcee, the film that entranced my mother and was a great box-office success. When I finally caught up with it at the National Film Theatre I was slightly disappointed. The Gay Divorcee is charmingly daffy with a mistaken-identity plot, absurd jokes from the comics—“How very whumsical” exclaims Eric Blore—and the delicious sequence where Edward Everett Horton sings “Let’s Knock Knees” with a young Betty Grable and a chorus of modestly swimsuited beauties. But the “Night and Day” number with Astaire and Rogers does not compare with “Cheek to Cheek” a year later. Similarly the “Continental” sequence may have well-devised routines for the stars, but the formation dancing that supports them lacks focus. Director Mark Sandrich and producer Pandro S. Berman seem divided between the musical numbers as spectacle and concentrating on the appeal of the new stars.

Any such uncertainty must have been resolved by Roberta (1934). Astaire and Rogers support a radiant Irene Dunne and the dramatic emphasis is on her romance with a very handsome Randolph Scott. Still, Ginger Rogers has a lot of fun with a fake accent and pretending to be a countess. She had also acquired greater assurance as a dancer. It was before the taps for the tap dances were post-synchronised and director William Seiter had miked the dance floor. This limited orchestrating the sound of the taps to the music but there are delightful moments when we hear Rogers’s squeals of delight when she gets a difficult step right. Then there are the soft taps of Astaire and Rogers dancing to “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes”.

By Top Hat (1935) the formula had been established along with a complex relationship with the audience. When Astaire sings and dances with Rogers “Isn’t It a Lovely Day to be Caught in the Rain” it is a new development in the plot—a dashing dancer wooing a pretty girl—but is appreciated as yet another routine by the viewers’ favourite stars. “Cheek to Cheek” is a declaration of love. Their final routine and the formation dances become a celebration of their union, enjoyed as developments in a witty mistaken-identity plot as well as further exciting dances together. Then there are the virtuoso routines. Astaire is menaced by a chorus line for the famous “Top Hat” number or does a sand dance to put Ginger to sleep. All this became a familiar pattern welcomed by audiences in the subsequent films.

Astaire, Hermes Pan and Rogers herself were artists at the top of their game and their regular audiences (including my parents) came to expect them to come up with something new each time they played together. In Shall We Dance (1937) they tap-danced on roller-skates for “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off”. In Swing Time they worked with George Stevens, one of the best directors of the period, who was later to make classics such as Woman of the Year and Shane. The plot was as preposterous as ever but the performances by Rogers and Astaire acquired new depth under Stevens’s direction, with the “Never Gonna Dance” number achieving an emotional intensity that went beyond anything in the script. Neither Astaire nor Stevens had any time for the colour bar, so when Astaire and Hermes Pan came up with a routine that paid tribute to the great black tap dancer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson there were no problems. Astaire played in blackface and danced a series of intricate variations on Robinson’s taps. This was also the time when through a camera trick Astaire danced to three enormous shadows.

The 1930s was one of the great periods for song-writing and the Astaire–Rogers films include some extraordinary collaborations with the best popular composers in the business. Many of them were at their best when they came to work in Hollywood. A few years before, Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II had revolutionised the American musical with Show Boat, and Kern and Hammerstein worked on Roberta while Kern and Dorothy Fields wrote the songs for Swing Time. Irving Berlin was responsible for the music in Top Hat, and shortly after completing Rhapsody in Blue and Porgy and Bess George and Ira Gershwin composed the songs for Shall We Dance. And although Astaire is best remembered as a dancer he was an excellent singer who could do full justice to the poetry of songs like Kern’s “The Way You Look Tonight” or the Gershwins’ “They Can’t Take That Away from Me”. When George Gershwin died not long after completing Shall We Dance, Astaire sang the song in the radio tribute program. Twelve years later in The Barkleys of Broadway Astaire and Rogers used the song for one of their key dances in the film.

Fred Astaire never saw himself as a great artist. “I was just doing it to make a buck,” he said in a last interview. But he undoubtedly was a great artist and his work was appreciated by a popular audience with a greater range of awareness than was ever realised at the time.