I’m watching the Fred and Ginger Box Set that Hari bought me so kindly. I’m doing this for the fifth time – I think.
The whole RKO bunch – especially the best of them – Top Hat and The Gay Divorcee are stand outs. Though I wonder how Universal got the rights for RKO movies in the UK.
Anyhoo (to quote Major Monogram), back to Mr. Astaire. Or, back to Mr. Astaire, Ms. Rogers, Mr. Horton, Mr. Blore, Mr. Polglase and Mr. Plunkett and Mr. Pan.
I think David Thomson in his review of Joseph Epstein’s Fred Astaire – called the stories “they were irrelevant upper-class fables with the sketchiest plots, a string for the pearls of dance routines married to some of our best popular songs”, and he isn’t too far wrong about that. The rest of the article is utter crap1. (I have to mention Self Styled Siren’s amazing blog here – its essential for anyone interested in old English movies) . Even without the songs, the movie (Top Hat is what I’m on about, mostly, but the others qualify) would be a splendid little confection, a souffle that melts in your mouth, leaving just a lingering sweetness – a Joseph Cotten smoke ring, ethereal, ephemeral and its gone…
The thing to remember about Astaire was that he was deeply insecure about his dancing. He worked at it. It all seems so effortless and easy, but just take a look at the picture here
That doesn’t seem so easy. And he knew that he made it look good – as he famously said later “I suppose I made it look easy, but gee whiz, did I work and worry”. Or at another time – “I don’t think I was completely happy with any of my dances”2 . You get the picture of a perfectionist who knew he would never be perfect, doing what he would call “A sweat job”. And in an age when every two bit celebrity calls himself or herself a perfectionist, it is refreshing to find someone whom everyone else called a perfectionist, but never applied that descriptor to himself.
But there is perfection – whether its in the rollerskate dance to “Lets call the whole thing off”
or the sandman dancing with an ashtray under his arm or a drunk destroying a bar while maudlin in self pity in “one for my baby”
Astaire also seems a genuinely nice guy. Debbie Reynolds tells a story of how he found her, a seventeen year old crying under the piano, after a particularly harsh and punishing rehearsal during “Singing in the Rain”. He takes her out to his sound stage and asks her to watch him rehearse. She watches him struggle and struggle for an hour, sweating and red faced, at the end of which he comes up to her and says, quietly – “You see how hard it is? It never gets easier. This is how it always is”. Or take Cyd Charisse describing how Tony Martin knew who she had been dancing with that day – “If I was black and blue, it was Gene. If I didn't have a scratch it was Fred” Or David Niven’s summation- “a pixie — timid, always warm-hearted, with a penchant for schoolboy jokes”.
For a guy who introduced some of the most famous songs in “The Great American Songbook”, he was remarkably diffident about his singing voice. “ It`s nice that all the composers have said that nobody interprets a lyric like Fred Astaire. But when it comes to selling records I was never worth anything particularly except as a collector’s item”, he said. Well. Not really. Eight number 1 records and 18 top 10 hits isn't really “never worth anything”.` Especially if one of them was “Night and Day”
Take a look at the song. Its a love story – the chase and the pursuit, the reluctance, the adoration and finally, the fantastic consummation – in four economical, graceful minutes. And Ginger’s look of astoundment in the afterglow of the that amazing dance sequence – I wish I could have some woman look at me like that – even if she was faking it 
If you want a much better discussion of the Astaire Rogers dance head over to Richard Corliss at Time – where he breaks down the “Caught in the Rain” song from Top Hat. The entire article is worth several reads, as well.
David Thomson says that Astaire was “Fred Astaire was not human, not sexual, not sexed”, but that’s just utter crap. Look at the song and the dance and tell me it’s not about fucking.
Since Astaire started his stage career when he was four and a half, and was partnered with his sister. That must have taken its toll on the whole dancing bit, because his first partner, Clare Luce – had to prod him to amp up the sex appeal. “I’m not your sister, you know, Fred!” she’s said to have told him. Astaire romancing anyone seemed to be like a kid cajoling a female relative for sweets – “Oh, please don’t be that way”, he’d say. And then he would be tap tap tapping all around her, grabbing her hand and letting go at a look – he was a gentleman, after all, and before you knew it, there would be two pairs of feet tapping, skirts swirling over sofas and tables, and you would have forgotten your late 20th century cynicism and irony and be watching in slack jawed wonder.
When it comes to dance, I’m a philistine. The kind of thing I would normally watch involves well endowed women and metal poles, in dim lighting. My father still reminds me that I slept through a Padma Subramaniam recital. But I can watch Astaire again and again. It doesnt matter if he’s dancing with a girl (The Ginger dances are special, of course, but Ginger needs a whole writeup herself) or a hatrack or a bunch of shoes.
Tell you what. I’m going to watch Swing Time. And leave you with Corliss’ last words
In the pop culture war, sex won — real, insolent, dirty sex, not Ginger's kind. And class went to the back of the class. It sits there, ignored and aloof, waiting for the young to recognize it. Can't they see how sensational that slim figure back there looks in his top hat, white tie and tails, as an indulgent smile plays on his face and his feet describe elaborate designs on the schoolroom floor? Can't they see that Britney Spears is not dance — that Fred Astaire is? I hope, some day, the kids will get Astaire. He's too cool to be the property of fogies like me
1. Though Epstein writes for the Weekly Standard – which means I should automatically hate him. David Thomson wrote some excellent stuff about Howard Hawks and Cary Grant But this time, much as I dislike this, I’m firmly on Epstein’s side. Astaire was no matinee idol, but to quote James Agate “May I suggest that the solution hangs on a little word of three letters? Mr Astaire's secret is that of the late Rudolph Valentino and of Mr Maurice Chevalier — sex, but sex so bejewelled and be-pixied that the weaker vessels who fall for it can pretend that it isn't sex at all but a sublimated projection of the Little Fellow with the Knuckles in His Eyes. You'd have thought by the look of the first night foyer that it was Mothering Thursday, since every woman in the place was urgent to take to her bosom this waif with the sad eyes and the twinkling feet.”