Top Hat 1935
I don’t think I had ever sat down and watched an entire Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movie before. I have been enjoying borrowing movies from people’s digital collections using Screen Passes, and one library I was browsing was stocked with a lot of great classics. I did some quick research and decided Top Hat was a good place to start (just edging Swing Time). It’s a good movie with some very solid dance numbers, but nothing really earth shattering. Maybe because it was early on, they weren’t getting crazy yet. Rogers and Astaire definitely had great chemistry and she did a great job of matching him step for step, not usually backwards, since they were usually dancing side by side, often tap dancing. There are some great songs including the Oscar-winning “Cheek to Cheek,” written by Irving Berlin. The story revolves around a romance between the two leads except that Rogers thinks Astaire is a married man. They stretch that misunderstanding out for quite a while to pretty good effect, but then once the truth comes out it is kind of a letdown. The movie was funnier than I thought it would be and the dancing a little less impressive, but it is definitely a good movie, especially given that it was made way back in 1935, just 7 years after the first talkie, though things were moving fast.
Written: 04 Jul 2021
Owned on: Digital