Country: US
Director: Mark Sandrich
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"Every once in a while I suddenly find myself dancing," Jerry Travers (Fred Astaire) says to Dale Tremont (Ginger Rogers) when they meet cute at a London hotel at the beginning of Top Hat. Jerry, a song-and-dance man, has just arrived in London to star in a show for his producer pal Horace Hardwick (Edward Everett Horton) and has been explaining to Horace his casual philosophy of romance. How else would Fred Astaire express his feelings in a musical film but through song and dance? Here the song is "No Strings (I'm Fancy Free)"—"No ties to my affections / I'm fancy free and free for anything fa-a-a-ncy"—and the dance is a raucous tap routine that has disturbed the sleep of the young woman in the room below, Dale. This is why Jerry feels the need to explain to her his occasional compulsion to sing and dance. At this first meeting, Dale responds to Jerry frostily. He responds to her with a level of interest that has him rethinking his no strings attitude to romance.
The rest of the movie might be described as Fred persists, Ginger resists, with complications. It's those complications that are wrung for every last drop of plot to sustain this light-as-air confection of a movie. The main complication is one of the oldest in the book—mistaken identity. Just when Dale is beginning to reconsider her opinion of Jerry, circumstances lead her to believe that Jerry is actually Horace, who happens to be the husband of her best friend Madge (Helen Broderick), and narrative coincidences conspire to perpetuate her error. Naturally, she finds her pursuer a cad and continues to reject his advances, while Jerry can't understand why she won't thaw in the face of his tenacity. Things definitely reach an impasse when Dale impulsively decides to marry a sexually ambiguous dress designer to avoid Jerry.
Besides the sublime team of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, Top Hat has a great deal else to recommend it. For one thing, there's the delightful score by Irving Berlin. It might not have the number of standards found in Shall We Dance or Swing Time, but its five songs are all tuneful and lyrically catchy, and one, "Cheek to Cheek," not only provides the music for the most memorable dance routine in the film but became a much-recorded standard. The song was nominated for an Oscar but came in second behind "Lullaby of Broadway," a well-crafted song which, however, doesn't strike me as having the lasting appeal of "Cheek to Cheek." But who ever credited the Academy with foresight? And its chances were probably hurt by the fact that the winner was the centerpiece of a mind-blowing 14-minute long Busby Berkeley production number in a movie directed by the master himself (Gold Diggers of 1935) and also that the only other nominee, "Lovely to Look At," was from another Astaire-Rogers movie, Roberta.
The art direction in Top Hat, which also received an Oscar nomination, is by Carroll Clark and Van Nest Polglase, who was head of the art department at RKO from 1932 to 1943. (Among the 331 films Polglase is credited with are all nine of the Astaire-Rogers musicals made at RKO in the 1930s as well as Citizen Kane, also made at RKO.) The great film director Michael Powell wrote in his autobiography that "the most genuinely creative member of a film unit, if the author of the original story and screenplay is excluded, is the art director . . . the creator of those miraculous images up there on the big screen." Top Hat is a great illustration of the truth of that statement, for the art direction of this film is largely responsible for its considerable visual appeal.
The first half of Top Hat takes place in London, mostly in a swanky hotel, and the decor here is pure Art Deco, all angles and planes and architectonic silhouettes arrayed in open, spacious settings. When the action moves to Venice in the second half of the film, the decor becomes rococo frou-frou full of sensuous curves and ornamentation, a look that might have been inspired by the decoration on a wedding cake. Throughout, the color scheme is pale—white on white on white. Dark colors are restricted largely to the costumes, which helps the actors stand out amid all that pallid visual splendor. The set decoration reaches its zenith in the elaborate sound stage representation of a fantasy Venice, a set so vast that two sound stages were required to house it.
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Top Hat, nominated for an Oscar as best picture, was the fifth of ten musicals Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers made together and one of five directed by Mark Sandrich. It is in the opinion of just about everybody one of the two best of the lot, the other being Swing Time (1936). I'd go along with that opinion, but if pressed to choose one as the absolute best, I'd go for Top Hat over Swing Time, as much as I like that George Stevens-directed delight. Top Hat is a more comfortable fit with the airiness I consider typical of Astaire-Rogers vehicles, and of all the Astaire-Rogers movies, it's the funniest and the most risqué.
This post is part of the Greatest Musicals Countdown at Wonders in the Dark, where Top Hat came in at no. 11. Click here to catch up on the countdown. You might also be interested in my post on "The Best Fred Astaire Musicals Without Ginger Rogers." Click here to read it.
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