NFR Project: 'Swing Time' (1936)

 

NFR Project: ‘Swing Time’

Dir: George Stevens

Scr: Howard Lindsay, Allan Scott, Dorothy Yost, Ben Holmes, Anthony Veiller, Rian James

Pho: David Abel

Ed: Henry Berman

Premiere: Aug. 27, 1936

103 min.

The sixth of 10 film collaborations between Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers is considered their best effort. Jerome Kerns and Dorothy Fields won as Oscar for the film’s song “The Way You Look Tonight,” and all the other numbers – “Pick Yourself Up,” “Waltz in Swing Time,” and “Never Gonna Dance” -- are painstakingly choreographed and executed. (“A Fine Romance” is a non-danced comic ballad.)

Supposedly the duo went through 47 takes of a passage in one of their numbers. Astaire was an obsessed perfectionist, and Rogers had an iron constitution. That they made their complex duets seem easy and effortless belies how much work went into them.

The movie is marred by the “Bojangles of Harlem” number Astaire performs. Ostensibly a tribute to the great Black tap dancer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, it features Astaire in blackface – a form of denigration no longer practiced.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: Trance and Dance in Bali.