Male vanity is a covert theme, although concealed in plain view, in George Stevens' musical Swing Time, a 1936 vehicle for Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. At the outset of the film, Lucky (Fred Astaire) is deterred from attending his own wedding by a hoax -- one of his fellow hoofers tells him that his pants must have cuffs to be stylish. Of course, this is untrue, but Lucky sends the offending garment to a tailor to have cuffs installed and, then, lounges around with the other male dancers without his trousers, playing cards, while the pastor and bride wait woefully in an upscale mansion a few miles away. Of course, this thwarts the wedding. At the end of the movie, a Latin lover's planned marriage to Ginger Rogers' character, Penny, is thwarted when Lucky tells the debonair fellow that his pants need to be tailored with cuffs -- thus sending his rival on a wild goose chase so that he, also, misses his own wedding. The amoral moral of this aspect of the film is that it's more important to look stylish and sharp than to attend your own wedding -- notwithstanding the tearful bride waiting at the altar. This theme is demonstrated early in the film in a sequence in which Lucky woos Penny by taking dance lessons from her -- Astaire has to pretend to be miserably incompetent as a dancer. But this is simply beyond Astaire -- he demonstrates his incompetency not by stepping on Penny's feet or moving out-of-synch with then music: rather, he swirls Penny in circles and, then, balletically falls to the ground, swooning like a wounded swan. Astaire's vanity wouldn't let him look clumsy -- when he stumbles and falls, pulling down his partner, he does so beautifully.
Swing Time is a cheerfully anarchic RKO Radio Picture, lavishly produced, the kind of movie that imagines Manhattan as a secular paradise-on-earth. European surrealism of this era was all despair -- melting clocks and decomposition; by contrast, American surrealism is a merry venture, mostly visible in movie musicals from the thirties: everyone is unrealistically happy, energetic and, even when suffering plot reversals, wildly optimistic. Lucky, a dancer, moonlights as a gambler and the film posits his ability to raise large sums of money on demand as required by the plot -- he simply conjures cash out of card games and roulette wheels. Lucky's sidekick, Pop (Victor Moore), is a magician who also specializes in card tricks -- if need be, he can cheat fortunes out of the villains who are, generally, far too amiable to deserve that appellation. Pop, Lucky's sidekick, is played by a bizarre-looking actor -- the man has a protuberant rump and is shaped, more or less, like a grinning fetus. He seems to have a hydrocephalic head that makes him a dead ringer for Claude Debussy. (This fetal-looking Debussy has the sort of features that camera's love -- one moment he looks positively hideous, the next instant, he grins at the camera and seems to be almost movie-star handsome. He's completely fascinating and his dumpy, shapeless body is the perfect counterpoint for Astaire's suave and rail-thin Gestalt.) Ginger Rogers as Penny, Lucky's love interest is more than equal to Astaire, so wonderfully self-confident and gorgeous, that she can turn away from Lucky in a heart-beat if he disappoints her, effortlessly securing a marriage proposal from Ricky Romero, the dark and outrageously handsome Latin lover and band leader who is Astaire's rival. Like Lucky, Penny has a side-kick, Mabel, a gin-soaked divorcee whose role is to supply the sardonic and cynical wise-cracks that comment on the action -- of course, she is also on hand as a comic love-interest for that fantastical creature, Pop.
The plot is vestigial. Lucky's colleagues, hating to loose their poker buddy, hoax him out of attending his own wedding. Lucky's fiancée is the daughter of a wealthy man, a banker of the classically bourgeois kind featured in films of this sort (played by Eric Blore who specialized in these parts). The banker tells Lucky that he can marry his daughter if he goes to New York and earns $25,000. Lucky plays poker, makes a lot of money, but this cash is taken from him by his gambling buddies -- he has bet with them that the marriage will take place but, of course, it doesn't. Lucky with Pop hitches a train to New York -- he's still wearing his wedding tuxedo, tails, and has a top hat. In New York, Lucky encounters Penny, a tough, resourceful working girl. Pop steals a quarter from her -- they have literally no money. When Penny complains to the cops, there's a Brechtian moment when a police officer, surveying Lucky's natty attire admits that his job is to protect the upper class from people like this young woman -- she is, in effect, treated like some kind of rapacious streetwalker. Lucky is unhappy that Pop snatched the girl's quarter and so he tracks her to her place of employment, a crooked dance instruction business. There he tries to endear himself to her by asking for a free lesson. When the smarmy boss tries to fire her, Lucky and Penny perform an improvised pas de deux, the first of the show's dances. Obviously, Lucky and Penny perform spectacularly with one another. They audition as dancers with Ricky Romero, a Latino band leader, who performs in immense and lavish ballrooms high in a skyscraper overlooking Central Park. There's a breathtaking scene in which Lucky and Penny look through a wall of windows down at the park, snow glittering outside as it falls through the city lights. Of course, Penny and Lucky fall in love. But, Lucky deputizes Pop to keep him from showing his affection for Penny -- he's still committed to earning the $25,000 to marry his fiancée, the banker's daughter. The two couples (Pop and Penny's friend, Mabel, Lucky and Penny) go to an abandoned roadhouse, buried in the snow. Penny is obviously now in love with Lucky and hurt when Lucky rebuffs her advances. Back in the city, Penny and Lucky perform atop a skyscraper in a majestic nightclub, The Silver Sandal. Astaire performs a virtuoso routine called "Bojangles" -- it commences with showgirls rotating a huge black peanut with fat human lips. The peanut turns out to be the soles of the shoes of an colossal African-American giant -- Bojangles. Fred Astaire is at the vertex of the giant's legs, in minstrel-style blackface (he spreads his arms in declamatory fashion like Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer). Astaire dances for six or so minutes, tapping his way through ever more elaborate and hallucinatory sets -- in the end, he dances with three huge shadows, mimicking their movements, until the shadows can no longer keep up with his increasingly intricate and accelerating dancing. The shadows bow out, having become fully autonomous -- Black giants like the figure that began the sequence. The film reverts, a bit wistfully, to its narrative. There are some misunderstandings. The fiancée shows up at an inopportune time. Penny gets engaged to Ricky Romero. But, as they say, all's well that end's well.
I'm not competent to comment on the dance scenes. People knowledgeable about this subject generally express awe at the beauty and complexity of the dancing -- it looks to me like standard dance moves (waltz, polka, ballet) that are adorned with high speed tap dancing embellishments. Stevens use a crane and dolly to shoot the dance sequences in sweeping continuous sequence shots -- there are very few cuts in any of the dance scenes. The Bojangles number, which is, at least, six minutes long is structured into no more than three shots. The sets are astonishing: topless prisms of translucent alabaster, ebony dance floors that are like vast black mirrors, cantilevered steps leading up the sides of vast glacial-white silos topped with dancing girls in ostrich plumes. None of these sets seem to have any ceilings -- the space is suggested to be like an Art Deco cathedral, soaring and majestic. Hotel suites are white on white with white settees against white walls where white end-tables support white phones and white lamps. One set for a dance scene looks vaguely like Schindler's famous set for the appearance of the Queen of the Night in Mozart's The Magic Flute -- scintillating stars arch up into a pale grey and glowing void. Ginger Rogers is fantastically beautifully and dressed in timeless, elegant gowns. Sometimes, Fred Astaire, with his otherworldly bulbous eyes, looks like Stan Laurel -- he even imitates Laurel in one of his dances. The dialogue is fast, whip-smart, and a little like the repartee in a Marx Brothers movie. At the New Amsterdam, an abandoned country tavern buried in deep snow, Penny's sidekick tries to distract Pop from supervising the lovers, Penny and Lucky. She says: "Come on, let me show you where we once fished through ice." Pop replies: "But I thought you said you only came out here in the summer." She responds: "That's right. Let me show you where we didn't fish through the ice."
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