The Melody Lingers On: A Century of Fred and Ginger
The Scoop features personal essays on movie-centric topics.
By Vicki Rakowski
Imagine that you’re out and about and a guy catches your eye. You maybe flirt a bit across the way from each other, or possibly a weird misunderstanding leads the two of you to having to interact for some reason. He’s not classically handsome, but he’s charismatic. You look your trademark amazing. Suddenly, he starts…singing at you.
This is weird, but weirder still, you go along with it. You let yourself be sung to, and then you even start dancing with this dude. You have been sung to with constant eye contact, and been flung around your environs while copying this guy’s every dance move.
That describes the majority of the 10 films featuring and starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. An absurd reason to meet or interact, and then a romantic or cute song, and then this gawky yet incredibly suave guy spins you around a makeshift dance floor to either your personal or the assembled company’s astonishment.
One time seems unbelievable, but 10 times? Astonishing. Yet over their 10-film partnership, that’s exactly what they did, over dozens of song and dance numbers, and mostly silly little farcical plots.
And no matter how unrealistic or repetitive the conceit, audiences continue to be charmed each time. Each Fred and Ginger song and dance routine is an equation that presents itself a little differently every time, but you look for the components and work out the values in each number.
This actually becomes part of the fun. What will Fred and Ginger do this time? Roller skate? Dance through an elaborate set that’s styled after a Venetian canal? Share a dance while one of them is under hypnosis? All of the above and more.
The Rosetta Stone of movie musicals
We all know musicals are a little silly. When somebody breaks out into song in front of you while out in public, you give them a wide berth. But if you’re already sitting down for a musical, you know what you’re here for.
When I was a kid, my grandparents watched me on some weekday evenings while my parents were working and in school. My dad would drop me off after school and my mom would come and pick me up well after bedtime. I remember this era of my childhood with mostly fondness, even though I recall my parents being tired pretty much all the time.
Once homework was done, dinner was eaten, and Wheel of Fortune was watched, there wasn’t much to do. But my Grandma had a pretty great selection of musicals on VHS. They were the movies of her girlhood, and she had all of the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers tapes.
The first one we ever watched was Carefree. I later found out that this is actually one of the most pared down of all of their films. It was 1938, and by then the partnership was drawing to a close. It also has the most insane premise: Fred Astaire is a psychologist and a friend of his comes for help trying to get his fiancée to finally agree to set a date for the wedding. The fiancée is Ginger Rogers, and she and Fred Astaire form an adversarial relationship until she dreams of dancing with him one night. From there it’s off to the races.
I was young and just starting to understand that romance was an exciting thing. In the dream dance sequence, Astaire sings a wistful, somewhat uptempo love song to Rogers, and she looks at him as though he hung the moon. He communicates such longing as he sings and such certainty as he holds her, and in return she communicates unwavering interest and desire.
Lucille Ball, of all people, had a good take on their partnership. She was a bit player at RKO, which produced all the Astaire-Rogers musicals, and was in their orbit in the 1930s. Ball summed it up perfectly: he gave her class, and she gave him sex appeal.
Watch all 10 films and you’ll see that this is pretty much spot-on. And this is what I was seeing before I understood what I was seeing.
I think this is the part that is still compelling nearly a century later. (Seriously, a century! That’s nuts.) Chemistry on screen is rare, unpredictable, and almost impossible to look away from. Their movies are where some of our most beloved standards originated—“Cheek to Cheek” by Irving Berlin or “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off” by the Gershwin Brothers. When you watch an Astaire and Rogers musical, you are getting a piece of the movie musical Rosetta Stone.
Let Yourself Be Amazed
Give me a piece of paper and I will provide you with a list of what was problematic about these movies. Watching black-and-white musicals set in the 1930s with the perspective of a person who’s only seven years away from the 2030s is pretty weird. Nevertheless, if you’re a musical fan and you’ve never seen one of their movies, I feel reasonably sure you’ll be charmed by it. (Follow the Fleet or Top Hat are great places to start. I’d start there before starting at the beginning. No shame in jumping around with these two.)
Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers’ combined power is something best understood when you watch it build on itself from film to film. But even if you’re not in it for the long haul of their whole partnership, or even just one entire film, look up one of their dance routines together. Maybe “Isn’t this A Lovely Day to Be Caught in the Rain” or “Cheek to Cheek”. Maybe “I Used to Be Color Blind”, which is the dream sequence song that first captured 10-year-old me. Let yourself be amazed by the athleticism of their dancing, the charisma that overrides silliness.
What these two were always able to communicate, without fail, is that it’s possible to be so swept away by another person that you can’t help but break into song and dance—again and again and again.
Vicki Rakowski is an enthusiastic consumer of all things art and literature, and a library director in the Chicagoland area.