Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers

The celebrated Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers films die between numbers, and there aren't enough numbers. As great as the dance sequences are, the twenty minutes of lumbering plot and unfunny comedy that you have to sit through to get to one are a penance. As a film-lover, I feel I need to watch each film through -- once; after that, I'll be happy to just re-play the good stuff to my heart's content.

Part of the problem with these films is that the relation of the dances (and, for that matter, the song lyrics, which Astaire always sings with charm and musicality) to the story (such as it is) is usually quite weak. The musical was still an evolving genre, both on stage and on film, and although a few tightly conceived works -- Show Boat, Strike Up the Band -- did exist by the time the Astaire/Rogers films were made, they were not used as any kind of model. Astaire/Rogers-type musicals were light and frothy, and in those days light and frothy musicals were not conceived to need any sort of organic impetus. Just whip 'em up. It took Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma! in 1943 to really change the landscape for all musicals. Until then, the songs in musicals were largely interchangeable -- and were, in fact, frequently interchanged. Most if not quite all Astaire/Rogers numbers would work equally well in any of their first eight movies, up through Carefree (the last two, The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle and The Barkleys of Broadway, are special cases). Sometimes, though, a number seems palpably to have got into the wrong film: the elegant "Let's Face the Music and Dance" ends the generally jaunty Follow the Fleet very awkwardly.

I don't have the reference right at hand, but I believe it was Gilbert Adair who wrote that one way of confirming Astaire's greatness was to freeze-frame during the dances; his body would always be captured in a position of "supreme elegance." I have tried this, and it is of course true. It is likely that, just as athletes tend to have hand/eye coordination that beggars that of the general population, that Astaire was in the stratosphere when it comes to the neglected sense "proprioception," defined as "the sense of the orientation of one's limbs in space." This can be aided by consciousness and intelligence but is largely instinctive. In a very real sense, Astaire's body had a mind of its own.