Fred & Ginger

...and Kenneth Branagh's widely panned song-and-dance adaptation of Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost...

...Katharine Hepburn's famous aphorism explaining Fred and Ginger's unique compatibility—"He gives her class and she gives him sex [appeal]"—is often cited, but it's not quite accurate...

...Before teaming with Astaire, Rogers had mostly played wiseacre, sassy American girls...

...Astaire's career, meanwhile, suffered something of a post-Ginger lull...

...The only movie musicals to have enjoyed any popular or critical success in recent years are cartoons: Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast, and The Little Mermaid...

...When Fred and Ginger dance, we see erotic attraction and seduction, comic misunderstanding and heartbreak—together with trust, faith, and consideration...

...It celebrates the couple's achievement while recognizing it as both transient (because of their mortality) and enduring...

...Fred and Ginger did not even share their first legitimate on-screen kiss until their eighth film, Carefree...

...in fact, it enhances it...

...Broadway is abuzz with news about Never Gonna Dance, an adaptation—set to open next season— of the 1936 Astaire-Rogers classic Swing Time...

...At the Academy Awards ceremony in 1950, Rogers presented Astaire with a special Oscar recognizing him "for his unique artistry and his contributions to the technique of musical pictures...

...MGM quickly planned another vehicle for the pair, The Barkleys of Broadway, but Garland fell ill and the studio called on Ginger Rogers to replace her, reuniting the old team after a decade for one last time...

...The very phrase "Fred and Ginger" still evokes a sense of elegance, glamour, and romance...

...the film was redeemed only by a wonderful Gershwin score and the comic presence of George Burns and Gracie Allen as co-stars...

...By largely dismissing the films' plots and preferring to focus on the dances (as well as the magnificent music and lyrics of Jerome Kern, Dorothy Fields, George and Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter, and Irving Berlin), Croce and others have missed something crucial, in Gallafent's view...

...Rogers and Astaire had met on Broadway...

...One may Lee Bockhorn is associate editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...

...In an Astaire-Rogers film," Croce writes, "the dancing is often the only real, the only serious business...

...Just as Fred and Ginger go on and on, so do attempts to explain their appeal...

...But despite their amicable relationship and the undeniable success of their films, both stars fretted about letting the series last too long...

...But Gallafent believes that Croce— along with others, such as John Mueller in his encyclopedic Astaire Dancing—too readily dismisses the films themselves...

...For example, in Swing Time, after Fred and Ginger's first spectacular dance, we spend twenty minutes waiting for them to overcome various obstacles so they can dance the "Waltz in Swing Time...

...In the pair's later movies, the well-established partnership of Astaire and Rogers placed new demands on the plots...

...Recent examples include the sensory overload of last year's Moulin Rouge...

...University of Warwick lecturer Edward Gallafent offers the latest such effort in Astaire and Rogers...

...Slightly bald...

...As performers from early on in both their lives, Astaire and Rogers were, first and foremost, professionals, and it was their mutual dedication to performance as performance rather than as a vehicle for self-expression that, paradoxically, allowed the artistry of the songs and dances to shine through...

...I have never used it as an outlet or as a means of expressing myself...

...Carried too far, an approach that overemphasizes the dances turns the films into something whose plots and comic moments we merely suffer through to get to the "good parts...

...As academics are wont to do, he refers to his observations as his "readings" of particular scenes or films, and often these are excruciating and tortured...

...His sister and longtime dance partner, Adele, had retired from show business in 1932 to marry an English nobleman, and Astaire's first post-Adele show, The Gay Divorce, drew a lukewarm response...

...Or to get dressed to go out and look for your dream girl, as Fred does while singing "Needle in a Haystack" in The Gay Divorcee...

...The Fred and Ginger cycle ended with Carefree (1938) and the pair's final RKO film, The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle (1939), a biopic about a famous pre-World War I era dance couple...

...But this is a far cry from claim-ing—as Gallafent too often does—that the films as a whole reach the same heights as those few precious minutes when Fred and Ginger are singing and dancing their way into each other's hearts, and into ours...

...everyone expected that...

...They offer as well a way back: a path out of the sexual morass into which we have fallen...

...It does no good to consider the songs and dances apart from the films, he writes, because "the dance sequences answer questions raised elsewhere and raise other questions which it will be the business of the film to answer...

...But recognizing this does not diminish Rogers's distinct value to Astaire...

...But the few moments they spent on screen together—particularly, dancing in the film's extravagant production number, "The Carioca"—were enough to convince both the public and RKO executives that they wanted to see this couple together again...

...The form still pops up sheepishly here and there...

...wonder why Gallafent bothered, since by all accounts the definitive analysis of the Astaire-Rogers partnership has already been written...

...To cite just one of many examples, Gallafent makes a lame attempt to convince us that the screenwriters of Shall We Dance had Shakespeare's Winter's Tale constantly on their minds...

...Another of Rogers's virtues was that she put up with all this: Witness her willingness, as her feet were bleeding raw inside her shoes, to endure forty-eight takes of the climatic final sequence of "Never Gonna Dance" in Swing Time...

...Ginger also made evident the fun the couple had during their up-tempo numbers...

...The death of the musical motion picture must be counted as one of our worst losses...

...Astaire's last Broadway show was reworked (and retitled The Gay Divorcee) in 1934 to create the first vehicle specifically for the new team...

...What made such films both good and popular then—but nonexistent today...

...Freed from the restraints of the Hays Code and "liberated" by the sexual revolution, we don't need sublimation...

...Astaire had suffered a career crisis when his sister retired, and henceforth was uneasy about becoming too closely identified with any particular female partner...

...Those seeking to validate Rogers's contribution to the partnership (most memorably, Ann Richards at the 1988 Democratic convention) have often repeated an old witticism: "Sure Fred Astaire was great, but don't forget Ginger Rogers did everything he did— backwards and in high heels...

...Movies have become such an intensely naturalistic form that we seem to believe only a cartoon, not a flesh-and-blood person, is capable of expressing emotion through song or dance...

...Astaire, already a vaudeville and Broadway star, decided in 1933 to try his luck in Hollywood...

...Meanwhile, Rogers made three films, including Stage Door, in which she more than held her own opposite RKO's other female star, Katharine Hepburn...

...And Astaire could get testy too, as shown by the now legendary fit he threw over Rogers's ostrich-feather dress in the "Cheek to Cheek" dance in Top Hat...

...Top Hat, which usually vies with Swing Time for consideration as the pair's best film, is also rumored to be in line for a Broadway treatment...

...Despite Gallafent's best efforts to convince us otherwise, in comparison with the three exquisite minutes of "Night and Day," the rest of The Gay Divorcee really does fall away in retrospect...

...In all their variety and endless inventiveness, they offer a picture of love far more complete than what we see in movies today...

...Astaire probably wouldn't have lasted long in Hollywood had his first partner not complemented his virtues so well...

...Heard this way, Dorothy Fields's touching lyric has more meaning for us today—Some day / When I'm awfully low, / and the world is cold, / I will feel a glow just thinking of you / and the way you look tonight—because, as Gallafent notes, "Astaire's 'some day' is now, and the predicted glow, ours...

...Though she managed to appear in ten other films for RKO during the Astaire-Rogers cycle, the time-consuming preparations for the dance numbers prevented her from competing for more non-musical parts...

...In Flying Down to Rio, the couple is fourth-billed, so it is not quite accurate to call it the first "Fred and Ginger" movie...

...Of course, they had the occasional squabbles inevitable in such a long-running partnership: After filming one of the dances in Follow the Fleet, Rogers told a reporter she wanted to take a vacation "digging mines...

...Once More, With Feeling," the highly acclaimed musical episode from last season on the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer...

...Even so, there is more real eroticism in their romantic dances than in the most titillating scene from any recent Hollywood skin flick...

...Viewed both individually and as a series, the films "know what they are doing and do it intelligently...

...she also quips that Roberta, the pair's third film, "came as close to plot-lessness as that ideal Astaire-Rogers musical we all like to think they should have made...

...Believe it or not, there is even an artistic way to pick up a garbage can...

...Ultimately, Fred and Ginger dance because they can't have premarital sex...

...Again, much of the credit for this belongs to Rogers...

...In his post-Ginger films, she notes, Astaire "never ceased to dance wonderfully and he has had some good dancing partners...

...Astaire detested mushy love scenes...

...So in 1937 the couple got their wish...

...This is not to deny that fully appreciating the dances requires acknowledging how they fit into the context of the films...

...Though they both would have been loath to admit it, Rogers and Astaire saved each other's careers...

...But more important, it was her temperament— her "genial resistance," in Croce's formulation—that "brought out [Astaire's] toughness and also his true masculine gallantry," and thus made him a plausible romantic leading man...

...Despite the now infamous (and oft-misquoted) screen test report of RKO official Burt Grady ("Can't act...

...The elegance and energy of their dancing derive directly from their submission to the old Hays Code conventions of courtship...

...He ended his 1959 autobiography, Steps in Time, by saying, "I have no desire to prove anything by [dance...

...But the ten Fred and Ginger films are something more than merely a marker by which Hollywood—and we—can measure our decline...

...As Croce observes, "The sexiest of [Astaire's] other partners, Rita Hayworth and Cyd Charisse, did very little for him...

...Thus the later films, sensing the imminent end of the partnership, increasingly stressed the passage of time and the possibility of negation, and began to create drama out of purposefully delaying or even denying the expectations of the couple's fans...

...The two even dated casually during the brief period before Ginger left for Hollywood...

...The budding partnership proved a godsend for the studio, which was on the brink of receivership...

...Contrary to rumors at the time, Astaire and Rogers enjoyed working together and were personally fond of one another...

...None of Astaire's other partners surpassed her ability to convey emotion simply by the way she looked at Astaire when they danced—or the post-coital glow she showed when they were done...

...the pair's films almost singlehandedly kept RKO alive during the 1930s...

...His dancing style earned the effusive praise of everyone from Balanchine to Barysh-nikov, and when combined with his vastly underrated singing, it made him one of the definitive artists of the twentieth century...

...To watch these enchanting films nearly seven decades after their creation inevitably compels reflection upon the differences between that era and ours...

...In the highly erotic space between the moment when a boy meets a girl and the moment the door closes on the honeymoon suite, there is room for a great romantic story—and a lot of great dancing...

...What Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers teach us is that to recover the sense of romance we find in their films, we also need to recover the old conventions that made those films possible...

...In the 1940s she went on to make a series of popular working-girl fables, most notably Kitty Foyle, for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress...

...But it is a world of sun without a moon...

...or to roller-skate in Central Park, as the couple does in Shall We Dance...

...RKO president David O. Selznick nabbed Astaire before leaving for MGM, and slotted him to appear in a big-budget musical called Flying Down to Rio...

...Rogers wanted to break free from musical comedies and pursue more straight comic and dramatic roles...

...Astaire made A Damsel in Distress with the twenty-year-old ice queen Joan Fontaine...

...But occasional insights like this cannot redeem Gallafent's dreadfully earnest Film Studies prose...

...All ten of the duo's films are now available on video and sell quite well...

...his biggest success in the 1940s came alongside Judy Garland in Easter Parade (1948...

...Those who have written about the pair almost always mention the accessible intimacy that they created in their dances...

...One of the joys of watching the RKO films in succession is witnessing her marked improvement as a dancer from one film to the next...

...the line "There isn't going to be any dance" becomes a running motif in the film...

...And Gallafent does offer some intriguing insights...

...Closer to the mark seems Croce's lament that, too often in the Astaire-Rogers films, "the two stars have somehow fallen among a gang of mental incompetents, and that includes the people behind the scenes writing the script...

...It was no longer enough to show the two meeting (or reuniting after many years apart) and becoming a couple...

...Arlene Croce, the respected choreographer and longtime dance critic for the New Yorker, published The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Book in 1972, and, as one critic recently noted, "It has become impossible to make any informed statement about those films without having consulted Croce's book: she set the standard for discussion...

...Also dances...

...In a 1987 BBC documentary about the history of RKO, when pressed to acknowledge that his movies were high art, Astaire retorted, "We just wanted to make a buck...

...Her book is not only thoroughly informative about all aspects of the films, but full of snappy, witty prose that is almost as fun to read as watching Fred and Ginger dance...

...She was cast in Rio as a last-minute replacement for Dorothy Jordan, who decided to go on her honeymoon with the film's producer, Merian Cooper...

...All this self-effacement was belied, of course, by Astaire's well-known perfectionism: the grueling rehearsal schedules, the endless takes, the relentless attention to detail...

...It's hard not to sympathize with Gal- lafent's aims...

...With the success of that film, more Astaire-Rogers movies followed in rapid succession: Roberta and Top Hat (both 1935), Follow the Fleet and Swing Time (both 1936), and Shall We Dance (1937...

...In an era that also gave us Clark Gable, Gary Cooper, and Cary Grant, the short, toupeed, waifish Astaire, with his peninsular chin and tragic eyes, needed the help...

...In Shall We Dance, the couple teases the audience by walking Ginger's dog on board an ocean liner, striding in rhythm to George Gershwin's charming incidental music...

...This persona, playfully resisting the advances of the dapper, insouciant Astaire, was what gave the pair's films their spark...

...After the box office numbers dipped for Swing Time and Shall We Dance, RKO finally relented to the pair's demands for a break from making "Fred and Ginger" movies...

...I know that artistry just happens...

...How Frederick Austerlitz of Nebraska and Virginia McMath of Texas became the greatest dance duo in movie history is a typical tale of Hollywood serendipity...

...Fred Astaire was a notoriously modest man...

...Rogers had now firmly established herself as one of Hollywood's leading comediennes, and Astaire was nearing the end of his contract with RKO...

...I just dance...

...Anyone with even a minimal knowledge of dance knows that Astaire was by far the more gifted dancer...

...listen, for example, to her audible, breathless giggles of delight during the friendly hijinks of Roberta's "I'll Be Hard to Handle...

...But the real reason we have nothing like the Astaire-Rogers films these days is our impoverished sense of romance...

...we can take our sex straight— and the result is that movie sex has lost the romantic elements that made it interesting to watch in the first place...

...It's a clever line, but it's also absurd...

...For instance, when discussing Astaire and Rogers's unforgettable first romantic adagio dance, to Cole Porter's classic "Night and Day," Croce declares that the rest of the film (The Gay Divorcee) "falls away in retrospect...

...while she was appearing in the Gershwin hit Girl Crazy, he was brought in to fix the choreography for Rogers and Allen Kearns in "Embrace-able You...

...He is right to stress the importance of viewing the ten films as a (somewhat) coherent series, because this explains the increasing self-consciousness of the films as they progressed...

...Ginger Rogers, meanwhile, also a Broadway star, had left for Hollywood several years before Astaire, and had already appeared in nineteen films...

...Many of Astaire's later partners— Eleanor Powell, Rita Hayworth, Cyd Charisse, and Leslie Caron, to name just four—were technically superior to Rogers as dancers...

...Viewed in this light, "The Way You Look Tonight" in Swing Time—which, not coincidentally, Fred sings, but he and Ginger do not dance to—becomes, in Gallafent's assessment, "a pivotal moment in the cycle, the first explicit recognition, or imagining, of an ending...

...And the dance films with Astaire transformed Rogers from a mere featured player into one of RKO's premier stars...

...You can see 1937 audiences squirming in their seats at this point, thinking, "If they'd just get rid of that silly dog, maybe they'd finally start dancing...

...Indeed, they are more genuinely sexy than anything today precisely because their films submitted to that code...

...What I think is the really dangerous approach is the 'let's be artistic' attitude," Astaire wrote...

...Sex unshaded by temperament isn't very interesting and, in relation to Astaire, it's useless...