Alice Brady

Even the best Fred and Ginger musicals are merely lavish excuses for some of the most elegant dancing ever put on screen, and Top Hat is no exception. The story is a silly but timeless tale of mistaken identity that compounds itself to extremes. Fred Astaire is the famous American hoofer Jerry Travers, in London preparing for a new show with his befuddled producer Horace Hardwick (the always entertaining Edward Everett Horton) when he falls for Dale Tremont (Ginger Rogers), a lovely, wisecracking American girl as light on her feet as Jerry. Dale believes Jerry to be Horace, the husband of her best friend Madge (Helen Broderick) and rebuffs his advances by marrying her dressmaker Alberto (Erik Rhodes), but in the best tradition of musical comedy, true love finds its own way. Practically the entire cast of the 1934 hit The Gay Divorcee reunites for this frothy confection, along with director Mark Sandrich, designer Van Nest Polglase, and choreographer Hermes Pan. Irving Berlin provides a tuneful score, including "Cheek to Cheek", which provides a classic duet for Astaire and Rogers, and "Top Hat, White Tie and Tails", which remains one of Astaire's finest solo numbers. Polglase outdoes himself with sets both elegant and outrageous and Hermes Pan's choreography is as smooth as ever, but ultimately it is the grace and chemistry of the leads that makes Top Hat top entertainment. --Sean Axmaker

The Gay Divorcee

The year before, in 1933, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers had grabbed America's attention in Flying Down to Rio, even though they were the second bananas in that film. The duo had a certain chemistry--Fred with his lighter-than-air elegance, Ginger with her moxie--and studio heads gambled that they could carry a starring vehicle of their own. Nobody guessed there would be another eight movies together after The Gay Divorcee, which turned into a huge success for RKO Pictures. The plot is the usual silliness, with Ginger a divorce-minded gal in England, Fred a dancer whose sincere interest in her is mistaken for something else. But plots never mattered much in these affairs, and this one achieves a kind of free-floating bliss. Astaire had starred in the stage version of the story, titled The Gay Divorce. The censors forced the extra e to be added to the title because surely no divorce could be portrayed as a happy one (this frothy movie's evidence notwithstanding). Only one song was carried over from the stage show, Cole Porter's smash hit "Night and Day," which forms the basis for a sublime pas de deux between Fred and Ginger. A tune, "The Continental," written for this film won the first Oscar ever awarded in the best-song category. --Robert Horton

'Young Mr Lincoln', which has been out of print for sometime and gets a deserved transfer to DVD, now gets to find a wider audience, and is one of the films to which radical Jane Fonda refers to in her recent biography 'My Life So Far' when discussing her conflicts with her father (Henry Fonda's sometime conservative nature is juxtaposed against 'The Grapes of Wrath' & 'Young Mr Lincoln' by Ms. Fonda). 'Young Mr Lincoln', along with films like 'The Big Sleep', 'The Harder They Fall' & 'Johnny Guitar' became a reference point for the early thinking of the critics-turned-auteurs, the French New Wave. It became a case study of that cahiers-du-cinema notion that a particular director's films had an auteurist notion behind them - Ford given the same treatment Alfred Hitchcock was (Francois Truffaut changing the view of Hitch - the shift from entertainer to auteur). Even the sometime caustic critic Pauline Kael described 'Young Mr Lincoln' as "one of John Ford's greatest films." Master Soviet-filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein ('The Battleship Potemkin', 'October')said of it, "Its source is a womb of popular and national spirit. This could account for its unity, its artistry, its genuine beauty." This reminds you that pre-Cold War, pre-McCarthyism, the USA had flirted with communist-socialist ideas found in works like 'Ten Days That Shook the World', 'USA' & 'Waiting for Lefty.' It also reminds you that 'Young Mr Lincoln', like 'The Grapes of Wrath' came out of the Great Depression and the ethos of the New Deal.

'Young Mr Lincoln' is also a key biopic, being made in the late 1930s on the back of such Hollywood-biopics as 'The Story of Louis Pasteur' & 'Juarez' - the famous Warners/Dieterle cycle of biopics that refashioned the genre towards a notion of entertainment over factual/historical accuracy (Daryl Zanuck was also key in this type of thinking)Thus, the biopic as we know it was formed from films like 'Young Mr Lincoln' - beating a path towards such key examples of the genre as 'Night & Day', 'Reach for the Sky', 'Patton', 'Raging Bull', 'Reds', 'Malcolm X', & 'A Beautiful Mind.' Here, Lincoln is placed into a courtroom plot not far from 'Amistad' or 'To Kill a Mockingbird' that may or may not be true (sadly I don't know enough about Abraham Lincoln to confirm!) - clearly seeing Lincoln's early life in event form as symbolic of his later work as a great American president who ended slavery (though of course, it would be close to a century later that the Civil Rights movement would begin to move the US from a South African-style segregation).

'Young Mr Lincoln' comes across as an old-fashioned entertainment, but also sits easily alongside the somewhat subversive nature of such films as 'I Was a Fugitive from a Chain Gang' & 'Sullivan's Travels' (the latter also reissued on DVD recently). I'm sure the content and philosophy of this film would wind up certain right-wing folks in the US, which is perhaps why Jane Fonda referred to it so often in context to her own radical work (e.g. 'They Shoot Horses, Don't They?', 'Coming Home'). A welcome issue on DVD and I think a key example of the Hollywood biopic - an important film that still deserves to be seen and has a content sadly lacking from the majority of contemporary American cinema.

The depiction of the class divide in the States is interesting. The wealthly industrialist is only interested in betting $100 a time on silly things, or in playing practical jokes on his so-called friends. He won't even think of supporting an orchestra - until someone points out the free publicity for his business! His scatter-brained wife holds lavish parties for her friends (sycophants, hangers-on), and is empty-headed and shallow. The poor unemployed musicians are at the other end of the spectrum, struggling to make ends meet in the supposed land of opportunity, with its 'classless' society.

On an even deeper level, we can see Stokowski as bridging this gap with his music. Classical music is the compensation that the poor receive to make their daily struggle for existence more bearable. It has a redemptive character bestowed by Stokowski on rich and poor alike.

I hadn't seen this film for 30 years myself, and found it still very enjoyable, although the trite plot and slightly mannered performances have dated a little. On the other hand, it is valuable for the reasons I've tried to outline. I recommend it highly.