SWING TIME

RKO, 1936 | BLACK AND WHITE, 103 MINUTES

DIRECTOR: GEORGE STEVENS PRODUCER: PANDRO S. BERMAN SCREENPLAY: HOWARD LINDSAY AND ALLAN SCOTT, FROM A STORY BY ERWIN S. GELSEY SONGS: JEROME KERN (MUSIC) AND DOROTHY FIELDS (LYRICS) CHOREOGRAPHERS: FRED ASTAIRE (UNCREDITED) AND HERMES PAN STARRING: FRED ASTAIRE (LUCKY GARNETT), GINGER ROGERS (PENNY CARROLL), VICTOR MOORE (POP GARDETTI), HELEN BRODERICK (MABEL ANDERSON), ERIC BLORE (GORDON), BETTY FURNESS (MARGARET WATSON), GEORGES METAXA (RICKY ROMERO), LANDERS STEVENS (JUDGE WATSON)

A hoofer with a gambling problem meets an attractive dance instructor.

In the enchanted stratosphere of films starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, Swing Time takes a place alongside Top Hat at the very summit. Many feel it is the greatest. The sublime score by Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields is one of the best that Astaire and Rogers—or anyone—ever had, and then there are those dances.

In Top Hat, Astaire and Rogers had cavorted elegantly in a fantasy Venice. In their next film, Follow the Fleet (1936), they changed personas and locales, perhaps too drastically, as a sailor on leave and a San Francisco dance-hall entertainer. In Swing Time, a happy medium lands them in Depression-era Manhattan with a kind of fanciful reality beyond the usual gossamer threads of mistaken identity and romantic entanglement. He’s broke, she teaches dance, and some sly subversion plays on the audience’s expectations like a Kern tune on a violin. “The Way You Look Tonight” is one of the greatest ballads ever written, but instead of his singing it to her in an elegant setting, it’s in her drab apartment, while she washes her hair. “A Fine Romance” offers sarcasm, not courtship, and in “Never Gonna Dance,” Astaire goes so far as to declare a moratorium on the one thing that gives him life and identity. As directed by Stevens, both stars play people we care about, not simply marvel at, and that depth of feeling ingeniously carries forward to the musical numbers.

“Waltz in Swing Time” Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire