The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle (1939) - film review

Vernon Castle is a vaudeville comic who makes a big impression on Irene Foote when he saves her dog from drowning in the sea one day.  Irene has theatrical ambitions herself and mistakes Vernon for a great actor.  When she realises that her new beau is a third rate comic, she is appalled and persuades him that he should make a career as a dancer.  Irene and Vernon marry and form a dancing couple, but have difficulty finding work.  Their big break comes when, in Paris, they meet the influential entrepreneuse Maggie Sutton.  The latter lands them a spot at the prestigious Café de Paris and in no time the couple are the talk of the town.  Not only are they successful as a dancing team but they become fashion trendsetters.  At the height of their fame, Irene and Vernon decide to settle down and live a quiet life in a small American town, but before they can do so World War I intervenes.  Vernon feels honour-bound to enlist in the Canadian Flying Corps but is confident that he will soon return to his beloved Irene...

This bittersweet biographical account of the once world-renowned dancing couple Vernon and Irene Castle feels like an appropriate way to end the series of musicals that Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers made for RKO in the 1930s.  The legendary pair would appear together one more time a decade later in The Barkleys of Broadway (1949), but this film marked the end of an era, providing a graceful way for Astaire and Rogers to sign off before embarking on their solo careers.

The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle is one of the least well regarded of the films that Astaire and Rogers made for RKO, probably because it is the least typical and is the only one to end tragically.  The film was not a great commercial success and indeed lost money at the box office, thereby sealing the fate of its two stars.  It may not be Top Hat but it is, all the same, a slick and lively production, its 90 minute runtime filled with dozens of musical numbers of the pre-WWI period without the film appearing crammed or losing its dramatic impetus.

Rogers gives her best performance to date and handles the touching dramatic scenes with surprising depth and sensitivity, yet there is also plenty of opportunity for her to show off her dancing skills with Astaire.  The film manages to be entertaining without appearing slight or fanciful, and moving without sinking too far into the mire of sentimentality.  The shock of the tragic denouement is softened by a remarkably poignant sequence in which ghosts of the two principal characters are seen dancing off into eternity.  The film may not match up to the sublime majesty of previous Astaire-Rogers vehicles, but it is nonetheless an elegant and beguiling production, a warm tribute to a now forgotten dancing act by another which, through the medium of cinema, has achieved a well-deserved immortality.

© Steve Chandler 2010

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