Swing Time (1936) - film review

When his friends play a practical joke on him, dancer John Garnett arrives too late for his wedding.  His prospective father-in-law is unimpressed by this turn of events and tells Garnett that he will only consent to the marriage once he has earned $25,000.  Determined not to be cheated out of his bride, Garnett hastily sets out for New York to make his fortune at the gambling tables.  Here, he meets an attractive dancing instructor, Penny, and instantly falls in love with her.  They form a dancing couple and have no difficulty finding work.  The problem is that if they are too successful Garnett will earn more than $25,000 and risks having to marry his fiancée back home.  To make matters worse, band leader Ricardo Romero is also in love with Penny and is just as determined to make her his wife...

By the time they came to make Swing Time, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers had become Hollywood’s biggest box office draw, their sprightly song and dance musical comedies being the perfect antidote to the Depression Era blues.  The charismatic couple had already featured in five films for RKO, including the hugely successful The Gay Divorcee (1934) and Top Hat (1935).  With the worst of America’s economic crisis over by 1937, the popularity of this iconic double act soon began to wane and their films were no longer the box office hits they had once been.  Swing Time is the last of the great Astaire-Rogers successes and is, arguably, their finest film.  They would appear together in four more films after this but, at the time, it must have been apparent that their glory years were behind them.

Swing Time has everything you could possibly want from a classic Astaire-Rogers musical.  Lavish, meticulously choreographed dance routines, a seemingly endless succession of uplifting songs, a healthy dose of slapstick, and plenty of good old-fashioned romance.  This is the film that features Jerome Kern’s best known songs: Pick Yourself Up, The Way You Look Tonight and A Fine Romance.  The dances are amongst the most imaginative and elegant ever to have been committed to celluloid, the highpoint being the stunning Never Gonna Dance number, in which Astaire and Rogers dance a tragic ode to doomed love across a spectacular Art Deco set.   Astaire even offers a spirited tribute to the legendary black dancer Bill Robinson, tastefully blacked up and somehow managing to dance with three enormous shadows of himself (achieved through some inventive trick photography).

Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers had never looked so good, nor performed so well together.  Even today, it is hard not to be mesmerised by the sheer elegance and complexity of their dance routines, many of which took weeks of hard work to perfect.  Victor Moore and Helen Broderick are on hand to provide some light relief and keep things bubbling along happily between the magnificent set piece dances.  With such an abundance of classic ballads and high class hoofing, Swing Time cannot fail to be one of the all time greats of Hollywood.  Who needs a course of anti-depressants when you can find instant relief with a glorious cinematic jewel like this?

© filmsdefrance.com 2009

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