Fred and Ginger in Swing Time

[A version of my film classics column for the New Sunday Express]

My favourite Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers routine is the wonderfully soulful dance sequence towards the end of Swing Time, one of their best films. The scene is set up by a series of misunderstandings of the sort that the Hollywood romantic comedy of the 1930s could toss off with both hands tied behind its back. “Lucky” Garnett (Astaire) has just discovered that his dance partner and true love Penny (Rogers) is going to marry someone else. He corners her on an empty stage, sings the stirring Jerome Kern composition “Never Gonna Dance”, and then gently persuades her into gliding about the floor with him; their movements gather urgency and passion, eventually growing into a full-fledged routine that ends with Rogers breathlessly pirouetting into – and out of – his arms. The sequence ends with her rushing out of the room as Astaire strikes a tragic, balletic pose. Fade to black.

And then we return to the film we were watching before this great scene began (billed in the poster above as "a glorious songburst of gayety and gladness"). In the final 10 minutes there is some slapstick comedy, some quick tying up of loose ends, a tidy reconciliation between the lovers, a final clinch. It’s a bit anti-climactic, really, because what a viewer will take away from Swing Time is not this neat happy ending but the mournful symphony that had preceded it – two star-crossed lovers, alone together for seemingly the last time. Nothing else in the film suggests that the tale of Lucky and Penny is a tragic love story (with those names, how could it be?), but the illusion is sustained for those few minutes.

To an extent, all the best Astaire-Rogers dance duets – the joyous ones and the sad ones – existed outside of, and transcended, the films they were in. Watching Swing Time again, I was reminded that in many ways they transcended the era as well. For sheer depth of feeling, “Never Gonna Dance” goes beyond almost anything else you’ll see in 1930s Hollywood, and I’m speaking as a huge fan of that period. This is performance art at its very best (and it was certainly treated as performance art: though it looks so spontaneous and unaffected onscreen, days of planning, rehearsing and retaking went into each of the Astaire-Rogers dance setpieces. Astaire was also particular about having them filmed in continuous takes).

Swing Time begins in classic screwball-comedy style, its two leads “meeting cute” when Lucky, a vaudeville performer, comes to New York to try and make the 25,000 dollars that will allow him to return to his hometown and marry his fiancée. Penny is a dance teacher with whom he (in this order) banters, trips about the stage, warbles, tap-dances, and falls in love. They are clearly meant for each other (they are Fred and Ginger, after all), but he’s an honourable guy, and what to do about the girl he has waiting back home? Also, what to do about the smarmy orchestra leader who has proposed to Lucky? Complications ensue.

Though Astaire and Rogers were both charismatic performers who were very good at light comedy (and, later in their careers, in dramatic roles too), such was the magic they created in their dances that it was difficult to work up much interest in the non-musical sequences in their films. Even so, Swing Time (along with Top Hat and, to an extent, Shall We Dance) is among the few films that hold up passably well even in the tone-deaf scenes. It would be a stretch to say it approaches the quality of the sophisticated comedies made by, say, Ernst Lubitsch, around the same time, but it has some sharp dialogues and engaging performances by Victor Moore and Helen Broderick (in supporting roles as Lucky and Penny’s middle-aged sidekicks).

It must be said that the film feels schizophrenic at times: the script and the performances make it very much a product of its period, but the dances are timeless; the predominant tone is light comedy, but the music is so elegiac. Often, an uneasy balance is struck between goofy humour and the lush romantic mood generated by Kern’s melodies, so that when Astaire serenades Rogers with the lovely song “The Way You Look Tonight”, the scene ends with him looking up from the piano to discover her looking down at him adoringly...and she has shampoo suds in her hair. Another song, “A Fine Romance”, which has Penny complaining about Lucky’s lack of ardour, combines a wistful melody and a beautiful, snowy setting with sarcastic lyrics (“We should be like a couple of hot tomatoes/But you’re as cold as yesterday’s mashed potatoes...You're calmer than the seals in the Arctic Ocean/At least they flap their fins to express emotion”). And even “Never Gonna Dance”, in the midst of its romantic hand-wringing, manages to sneak in a wry reference to Groucho and Harpo Marx.

Among the other highlights, my favourite is the brilliantly uninhibited dance duet that takes place when Penny is about to be fired and Lucky decides to show her boss how much she’s “taught” him (the very idea of Astaire being a clod with two left feet, “as awkward as a camel”, makes for fine comic material in its own right. “Nobody could teach you how to dance in a million years,” Penny tells Lucky at one point, possibly a reference to Astaire’s real-life reputation as an untrained genius). There’s also Astaire’s tap-dancing solo “Bojangles of Harlem”, which shows us the full breadth of the perfectionism he brought to his art, but also reminds us that his solo efforts (technically breathtaking as they were) usually lacked the warmth of his collaborations with Rogers, the satisfaction that comes with seeing two performers in complete harmony. In the list of the most graceful and enduring things cinema has given us, their partnership must stand near the very top.

P.S. YouTube can be so useful and so infuriating at the same time. Here’s a video of the full “Never Gonna Dance” routine, though a tiny box on a computer screen is hardly the place to watch this sequence for the first time. (As Norma Desmond said in Sunset Boulevard, “I’m still big, it’s the pictures that got small.”) And here’s another great dance, the “Cheek to Cheek” number from Top Hat.

And a nice, sardonic but affectionate review by Alan Vanneman on Bright Lights Film here.