The most popular film program I ever put together was a library series called Screen Deco. Before it kicked off, I was often asked, “What is Screen Deco?” I would always define it by using the most popular example: Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Their films are the essence of the Art Deco style. The series concluded in the spring of 2012 with Swing Time (1936), which is a glorious illusion of top hats, silk Georgette gowns, Art Deco nightclubs– and class. It’s in no way a film about realism, not when Fred rides the rails in a tuxedo. The storylines could be as unreal as the fake snow gently falling on our two stars. But the Astaire-Rogers films were designed to take audiences on an escape from the harsh reality outside movie theatres. Except for a couple passing references to the Depression, the film is pure escapism. Their collaborations were, above all else, stories about love, and that’s timeless. Regardless of whether our economy is up or down, regardless of social attitudes or world politics, Fred and Ginger are always with us in these romantic fables expressing the American dream.
I have a special fondness for the films they made at RKO in the 1930s because seeing a Fred & Ginger film on New Year’s Eve has remained a tradition. Back in the day, local television would play one right after another into the wee hours of the morning. That’s where I experienced the magic of films like Flying Down to Rio, The Gay Divorcee, Top Hat, and all the others. Being a little kid in the 1980s, I might not have been able to follow all the various plot twists involving mistaken identities, and I might not have recognized all the wonderful supporting characters I would come to recognize as Eric Blore, Edward Everett Horton and Helen Broderick, but I had sense enough to know that what I saw on the TV screen was dancing perfection.
It made such an impact that when I decided to take up ballroom dance for a time in the early 2000s, there was only one dance studio I wanted to attend: Fred Astaire Dance Studio on Michigan Avenue in Chicago. (This was years before one popped up in Park Ridge.) In the 1940s, Fred Astaire started the chain to capitalize on his great success, but many years later he sold his interest in it. Nonetheless, the brand name continued. I might not have been a confident dancer– and perhaps I should’ve followed the advice of dance teacher Ginger Rogers when she tells Fred he should save his money– but I made the attempt because of Fred Astaire; I stayed with it until I had graduated to the “Social Ease” level. The attraction of films like Swing Time is the desire to be just a little like the gentleman on the screen. If only we could be as smooth in real life.
For any student of dance who really wants to understand the musical numbers seen in this film, the only book you need is John Mueller’s Astaire Dancing. Mueller also supplies the commentary on the Swing Time dvd. However, I’d rather say a few words about the secondary reason why this film is a visual delight. It’s because of the Art Deco sets by art director Van Nest Polglase. He had come to RKO in 1932, and it was during his tenure there that the look of the Astaire-Rogers films became defined. These stylish musicals displayed a sleek elegance with an emphasis on strong black and white contrasts. Polglase’s team at RKO included unit art director Carroll Clark. Some accounts give full credit to Clark, whose involvement was more hands-on. Together, they designed films that are the essence of high style and sophistication.
The Art Deco nightclubs in this film are amazing, none more so than The Silver Sandal. In the book Screen Deco, Howard Mandelbaum and Eric Myers describe it as the most stunning of the three nightclub sets in the film. “A glittering dream world of black and silver, it enhanced Fred and Ginger’s ‘fine romance.’ Two huge staircases converged in a semi-circle to form the club’s entrance. Guests descended the staircase alongside curving tiers of tables, each table bearing a silver tablecloth and a softly glowing Saturn lamp. At the bottom of the staircases was the spacious dance floor with its design pattern of concentric diamonds in black and gray. Underneath the miraculously unsupported platform where the staircases met was the round, white bandstand, placed above a foreshortened view of midtown skyscrapers inlaid on the floor. All of this was set against huge windows revealing a star-strewn night sky, which added a shimmering undulation to Fred and Ginger’s ‘Never Gonna Dance.’”
The re-designed Silver Sandal as seen in this vintage lobby card…
The set was the creation not of Polglase or Clark, but of John Harkrider. He was a Broadway designer and had created the costumes in the Florenz Ziegfeld stage shows during the 1920s. He worked on such Broadway productions as Showboat in 1927. In Swing Time, Harkrider also designed the costumes seen in the “Bojangles of Harlem” musical number, which was Fred Astaire’s tribute to the great dancer Bill Robinson.
Swing Time is a film audiences never tire of. There’s always something new to appreciate about it. One of those delights is Ginger Rogers’ performance: not only as a dancer—she performs some of her most difficult steps in this film– but overall as an actress. She brings a vulnerability to a character whose depth might not have existed in the screenplay. Other writers have commented that the direction of George Stevens may have contributed significantly to this. I was also struck by something author John Mueller has noticed: the rhythm of Fred Astaire when he’s not dancing, as if there was a musicality to his gestures. One notices this in the elegant way he throws the dice when he’s gambling with his vaudeville troupe at the start of the film.
It’s over twenty minutes before the first musical number begins in Swing Time. I’ve never had an issue with that, but I learned years back that there had been an earlier song that Astaire performs onstage with his sidekick, Pop, played by Victor Moore. The song was called “It’s Not in the Cards,” but it was deemed a weaker number and was cut shortly after its initial premiere at Radio City Music Hall. Apparently, its inclusion in the film was not in the cards.
Arlene Croce, who authored The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Book, summed it up best when she wrote of this picture, “Swing Time is a movie about a myth, the myth of Fred and Ginger and the imaginary world of romance they live in. It is a world of nighttime frolics very much like Top Hat’s (1935), but it is also a middle-class, workaday, American world… Swing Time is based on Top Hat, not as a remake, but as a jazz rhapsody might be based on a classic theme; its materials are romantic irony, contrast, the fantasy of things going in reverse. The snow of Swing Time is as magical as the rain of ‘Isn’t This a Lovely Day?’ and the white hotels of Venice. If you put Top Hat in a glass ball like a paperweight and turned it upside down, it would be Swing Time. And at the end of Swing Time, the sun comes out through the falling snow.”
And so our curtain comes down on that image of Fred & Ginger and the falling snow. Their films offered us something elegant and beautiful to behold, and that’s what Screen Deco was all about.
~MCH
Learning the tango with Kelya, my Brazilian dance instructor at Fred Astaire Dance Studio.
