Wednesday, February 5, 2025

NFR Project: 'Top Hat' (1935)

 

NFR Project: ‘Top Hat’

Dir: Mark Sandrich

Scr: Allan Scott, Dwight Taylor

Pho: David Abel

Ed: William Hamilton

Premiere: Aug. 29, 1935

101 min.

The plot is negligible. An American dancer in London, Jerry (Fred Astaire), falls for model Dale (Ginger Rogers), but she’s under the mistaken impression that he’s a married man. He follows her to Venice to straighten everything out.

That’s it. This gossamer thread of a storyline is, fortunately, entertainingly funny and staffed with great character actors – Edward Everett Horton, Eric Blore, Erik Rhodes, and Helen Broderick. The farce is propelled through a series of wry observations, malapropisms, comic glowers, and slapped faces.

Likewise, the movie is set in Cloud-Cuckoo Land – a lavishly designed, palatial Art Deco setting all gleaming floors and crisp angles. It’s a perfect situation in which to stage a romantic fantasy, at heart which this is. Everything serves to deliver the goods – the dance numbers that tell a story in themselves.

On hand is a top-notch score from Irving Berlin, a soundtrack full of hits. Astaire starts out with a jaunty, aggressive tap proclaiming his singlehood in “No Strings.” His clatter awakens Ginger Rogers in the suite below. She complains. He spreads sand on the floor, and dances a gentle sand dance to soothe her to sleep.

Later the two meet cute in a rainstorm under a gazebo. He sings “Isn’t It a Lovely Day (to Be Caught in the Rain)?”, and the two dancing a courtship dance, tattooing the floor, testing each other’s tapping skills, spinning into glee together. Obviously, they are meant to be together.

Then Fred dances solo on stage to “Top Hat, White Tie, and Tails,” banging out the rhythms while a file of similarly duded-up gents mirror his moves behind him Finally he turns and knocks off the members of the chorus with blasts of his cane. There can be only one Fred Astaire.

“Cheek to Cheek” is remarkable for its sinuously danced intimacy. Rogers wears a (notoriously) feathered dress which captures the light and shimmers as she moves. Astaire is elegance personified, wooing Rogers with words and music, and, finally, dance.

From this point on the end is in sight, and only the big number “The Piccolino,” an oddly uninvolving extravanganza, remains to be enjoyed. Astaire and Rogers literally dance their way out of the film.

In all cases, the camera does little more than record the full-figure dancing of the principals. There are no cuts, no close-ups, no cinematic cheating. These are real-time, insanely difficult routines, and to see Fred and Ginger step through their paces with easy grace lets us inhabit that higher realm for a time, to be dazzled by the possibilities performers present.

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

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