Most of the earliest musicals are pretty much boring affairs. Long shots of chorus lines and stiff vocalists seem to be more a documentary record of vaudeville and burlesque than the “all talking, all singing, all dancing” entertainments they purported to be. Sound had just come in and many filmmakers seemed to have no idea how to re-mobilize a camera that had become a prisoner of the sound proof booth. Post-sync techniques were soon to be developed but early musical performances were largely stage bound, wooden and far from spectacular.
Enter Busby Berkeley at Warner Bros. Suddenly the musical opened up with numbers edited into increasingly outrageous close ups of beautiful faces, bare legs, tapping feet, luminescent pianos, waterfalls and the kaleidoscopic overhead vibrations of scantily clad chorines. Starting with “42nd Street” in 1933, Berkeley moved from a choreographer credit to the director’s chair and churned out such crowd pleasers as “Gold Diggers of 1933”, “Dames”, and his greatest of all, “Footlight Parade”.
Something different was happening over at RKO. The man Rudolph Nureyev once called the greatest American dancer of all time, Fred Astaire, had partnered with Ginger Rogers, a young supporting actress and chorine from the Berkeley casts. They had starred as a secondary love interest couple in “Flying Down to Rio” in 1933. Stealing the show with their dancing, the studio moved them to a headlining position with “The Gay Divorcee” the next year, then back to supporting roles in “Roberta”.
“Top Hat” was their fourth film together and their second at the top of the bill. It was RKO’s biggest hit of the year and held onto that title for the team during their career together.
What had changed from the beginning was Astaire’s insistence on the camera moving with the performers and holding the editing to a minimum. What we get as a result are full-bodied shots of great dance numbers, photographed from a distance that allowed the viewer to see the dancers in detail and to marvel at the sometimes intricate and always demanding routines that they put themselves through. If Busby Berkeley had pioneered the breathtaking production number spinning into the fantastic, Astaire was responsible for the spotlight being trained on the very real talent of the performers, anchored firmly in the atmosphere of a world turned fantastic by their artistry.
Another convention that the Astaire-Rogers production team adopted that helped the musical to become one of the great American genres was the pacing of the numbers themselves. Where the Warner’s films were often backstage musicals with most of the singing and dancing crammed into a spectacular but short final 20 minutes, the RKO productions spaced the interludes evenly throughout the film. Also, there was the insistence that the songs and dances reflect and further the storyline; that every number have a dramatic purpose as well as a musical one.
In selecting the best example of a Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musical, it really comes down to two movies. The team felt their best film was “Swing Time” directed in 1936 by George Stevens. Rogers said she believed he brought something different to the formula. I would agree with that. It also contains what most critics think is the pair’s greatest performance on film, “Never Gonna Dance”. No argument there either, although “Cheek to Cheek” in “Top Hat” is one memorable number and a close contender for the title.
“Top Hat” is the most iconic of the Astaire-Rogers pairings. It gets my nod due to the consistent excellence of the aforementioned innovations that arrive fully formed with this film, the great Irving Berlin score, the smart comedy script (Dwight Taylor and Allen Scott) performed by an ensemble of classic character actors (Edward Everett Horton, Erik Rhodes, Eric Blore and Helen Broderick) at the top of their craft, the no-holds-barred Art Deco production design (Carroll Clark and Van Nest Polglase), Fred Astaire’s underestimated singing talent and the wonderful dancing of the greatest musical team in history.
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