If Venice actually looked like the gleaming Art Deco theme park of Top Hat, I’d go in a minute. What an idealized vision of loveliness it is, the perfect setting for posing in immaculate evening attire as you sing the Piccolino to your sidecar-sipping audience.
What if ships had engine rooms like the iridescent shimmering fantasy in Shall We Dance? Who wouldn’t want to be a stoker there? No hard work, no heat, no smoke and strain—just Fred Astaire shooting around the room like a roman candle in Slap That Bass.
Who could ever leave the rooftop nightclub of Swing Time with its sweeping double staircase and panoramic picture window framing Central Park in the snow?
It occurs to me that the Fred&Ginger Land of those 1930s musicals represents a kind of heaven, a nirvana where everybody is beautiful, life is gracious, and the only strife comes from disagreeing with your butler about the proper knot in your bowtie (Top Hat). Oh, once in a while you are obliged to deal with ostrich feathers all over the floor (Top Hat again) or the romantic travails of some excruciatingly dull couple (Follow the Fleet), but that’s about it.
Unlike the dishwater-bland heaven portrayed in Sunday school salvation manuals, Fred&Ginger Heaven fills the air with terrific music, courtesy of Cole Porter and Irving Berlin and Jerome Kern and the Gershwins. Cocktails and bubble baths (even simultaneously) are de rigeur. Everybody dresses for dinner, and nobody has underarm stains or scuffed shoes. Floors shine like mirrors, 24/7, but you never see anybody actually out there sweating away with a mop or a duster.
Fred&Ginger Heaven is a world without ceilings, a black & white Eden where snowstorms don’t chill, heat doesn’t wilt, and rain doesn’t soak. In fact, the weather tailor-makes itself to your needs: feathery silver snow accompanies your wry courtship song A Fine Romance, an oh-so-civilized rainstorm is kept at bay by a strategically-positioned gazebo so you can court your girl with Isn’t It a Lovely Day (To Get Caught in the Rain), and the enervating heat of Rio is swept away when you’re standing on the wings of an airplane swooping over Sugarloaf.
Other studios during the 1930s made movie musicals, but only RKO’s Fred & Ginger shows have resisted spoilage over time. A large part of that has to do with their musical integrity. The producer secured the best composers—Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, George Gershwin—and allowed them creative freedom. That one factor alone produced more great standard songs than any other movie musicals. As a rule, the songs were placed perfectly into the movie and given precisely the presentation they needed, although every once in a while a misfire occurred—such as the downright soggy placement of They Can’t Take That Away from Me in "Shall We Dance".
Fred Astaire himself was in command of the dances, and it was his insistence on honest, no-faking camera work that has left those dance numbers so amazing after all these years. When you watch him create magic in a few square feet as he taps his way around hotel-room furniture in No Strings from "Top Hat", you can tell that he’s really doing it, and he’s doing it in real time. One sustained shot, no edits, no fancy camera angles. Just Fred, the floor, and the furniture. He doesn’t bump into the side table or anything—at least not in the scene as we have it. Behind all that effortlessness stood weeks of rehearsal and a bucket of takes. One mistake and they started over from the beginning.
The songs and the dances were the high points, but they alone don’t account for the timelessness that pervades the best of the series—The Gay Divorcee, Top Hat, Follow the Fleet, Swing Time, Shall We Dance. One would think that the Fred&Ginger flicks would have dated much more dramatically than the Busby Berkeley flicks from Warner Bros., especially given that the Berkeley movies at least took the Depression straight on and even made some attempts at social commentary—consider My Forgotten Man from "Golddiggers of 1933". The Fred&Ginger movies, on the other hand, were pure escapism, set in a mythical land where the Depression was far, far away. (It’s true that Swing Time makes some allusions to Depression-era New York, but throughout the movie Fred & Ginger remain beautifully dressed and in gorgeous surroundings.)
But that’s exactly what’s so dated about the Busby Berkeley movies: they’re very much products of a time and place. On the other hand, Top Hat‘s fantasy setting accounts for its endurance—75 years old and still counting. Absolutely nothing in Top Hat connects with a real world that any of us would recognize. It is set in a few idealized locations in upper-crust London—a luxury hotel, a riding range, and a theater—with a third act taking place in a gleaming-white stylized Venice Lido. The cast is the Fred&Ginger Repertory Company, a zany group of loveable cartoon characters: Edward Everett Horton as the perennially befuddled middle-aged man, Helen Broderick as his wisecracking wife, Eric Blore at his all-time best turn as a British eccentric manservant, and Erik Rhodes romping through his delectable Italian-gigolo comic patter.
The same gang, with a few adjustments, lights up The Gay Divorcee and Swing Time, with variants on those characters popping up in almost all of the Fred & Ginger movies. In their own kooky way, they’re just as important as the music. Eric Blore’s whimsical zingers are almost as much fun as the dance numbers, ditto Helen Broderick’s toothy, Eleanor-Roosevelt-ish smile as she smothers Ginger Rogers with motherly, albeit slightly ditzy, advice.
What a topsy-turvy world it was. They hired gigolos but they didn’t have sex. They flirted but they never slept around. They filled the air with sexual innuendo but unmarried folks remained as chaste as kittens. Fred & Ginger didn’t even share a passionate kiss until nearly the end of the series, in Carefree. Except for the end-of-series The Story of Irene and Vernon Castle our pair always got together at the end, usually for one dancelike fling—my favorite is the exuberant swing-and-dip that closes Swing Time.
So let’s put it this way. Once in a while I can enjoy Golddiggers of 1933 or Footlight Parade or 42nd Street, although I admit to hitting the forward button past most of the dialog and plot scenes, and typically past Ruby Keeler’s solo numbers as well. I’ve never made it all the way through Rose-Marie or The New Moon or Maytime or any of the other Eddy/Macdonald operettas from 1930s MGM.
But I treasure every moment spent in Fred&Ginger Land. Those sweet, dear movies—even the runts of the litter like Roberta— just get better and better with time, funnier and warmer and more loveable.
Someday I’m going to introduce myself to somebody by saying: "Chance is the fool’s name for fate". With any luck, I will discover a fellow devotée. At the worst, I’ll wind up on the receiving end of a funny look.