Top Hat review – stylishly madcap dance film with Astaire and Rogers cheek to cheek – The Guardian
Like a Shakespearian marriage comedy with a spoonful of Feydeau farce, this madcap musical from 1935, from screenwriters Allan Scott and Dwight Taylor and director Mark Sandrich, saunters again for a re-release. It options Fred Astaire as Jerry, the American dance star visiting London, a metropolis seen in virtually surreally bizarre again projections – and Astaire by the way does an deliberately horrible Cockney accent when he pretends to be a hansom cab driver. (It is among the uncommon instances he doesn’t seem in faultless night gown.) Irving Berlin’s basic songs Cheek to Cheek and High Hat, White Tie and Tails are nice, and Astaire swirls on a forward-tilting gyroscopic axis together with his spindly legs and arms effortlessly orbiting him like Saturn’s moons.
Enjoying reverse him – and naturally, as she herself identified, doing the identical factor as Astaire solely backwards and in heels – is Ginger Rogers; she is Dale Tremont, a freethinkingly trendy younger American girl who has a romantic escapade with Jerry, however will get upset when she thinks he’s the husband of her pal Madge (Helen Broderick). In a tizzy of emotional harm Dale flees to Venice the place she impulsively decides to marry her highly-strung Italian couturier Alberto Beddini (Erik Rhodes). In the meantime Madge’s precise husband, theatre impresario Horace Hardwick (Edward Everett Horton), brings Jerry over to the Venice Lido: a fairly terribly camp flooded stage set of canals and bridges, like one thing from Las Vegas. Eric Blore offers us some very broad comedy as Bates, Horace’s grumpy manservant and grasp of disguise.
Astaire’s feline inverted-triangle face smiles atop a black swallow-tailed physique undulating throughout the display screen; he creates an unique strangeness, juxtaposed with Ginger Rogers’s level-headed simplicity. However ungallantly, the movie by no means permits her a solo flip to match the various that Astaire has. The Italians have their “white phone” films of the 30s and 40s; High Hat is from an period when whole flats and resort rooms have been white, and the film’s theatrical heritage implies that the characters would do some transient stage enterprise in these rooms in an unedited silence. This can be a movie wherein a bellboy might seem with a telegram and stand there patiently, receives a commission and go.
High Hat displays a transatlantic sort of universe, the Brit dimension absorbed into American waspy class, and sweetened with some mannered comedy; this was a Hollywood that liked PG Wodehouse. Astaire himself just isn’t a comic book participant exactly, although his star high quality means that he’s by no means upstaged by the humorous smaller roles. Rogers has actual model, sporting some wonderful robes with panache, and that panache guides and accelerates your complete image.
Adblock take a look at (Why?)
