This post is part of the TCM Summer Under the Stars Blogathon, hosted by Journeys in Classic Film and Musings of a Classic Film Addict. See the other posts here.
Top Hat opens on two pairs of dancing feet. The man wears a tailcoat; the woman an evening gown. As they twirl across the screen, the credits seem almost superfluous. Top Hat could only be a Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers musical—a soufflé, luminous and light as air.
The plot is of little consequence. Jerry Travers (Astaire), a celebrated dancer, is in London to see impresario Horace Hardwicke (Edward Everett Horton, playing one of his patented Babbitts), who also happens to be a close friend. He waits for Horace in the Thackeray Club, a venerable institution with a noise policy on par with the Diogenes: a man clearing his throat is enough to provoke the censure of an entire room. Jerry isn’t prone to loud outbursts, just impromptu tap routines loud enough to wake Dale Tremont (Rogers), who has the room below. They meet over her noise complaint. Instantly smitten, Jerry pursues her the next day, making an amiable nuisance of himself until he finally woos her. And then she confuses him with Horace—who is married to her friend Madge (Helen Broderick)—and thinks she’s fallen in love with a cad. Mistaken identities and missed connections abound.
The creaky screenplay isn’t Top Hat’s main attraction; the songs and dances are and Irving Berlin’s score is almost an embarrassment of riches. Jerry accidentally wakes Dale with ‘No Strings (I’m Fancy Free)’, with Astaire launching into the lyrics mid-sentence, as naturally as breathing. ‘Isn’t This a Lovely Day?’, sung and danced during a convenient downpour, blooms with the delight of couple discovering how much they enjoy each other’s company. As Dale thaws, Rogers replaces scepticism with warmth and at last, delight. And ‘Cheek to Cheek’, one of the greatest routines Astaire and Rogers ever performed, soars above plot contrivances into the sublime.
Astaire’s tap solo, ‘Top Hat, White Tie and Tails’, is the film’s other great setpiece. Set on stage, it recreates the feel of a live performance with minimal cuts, director Mark Sandrich carefully keeping Astaire fully in the frame to showcase each tap and turn. Astaire changes tempo without warning, bursting into activity from a complete standstill or decelerating into a slide with casual grace—and absolute control. The routine ends with a mock shooting gallery, Astaire aiming his cane at a line of dancers and picking them off one by one with a ‘blast’ of tap—a dazzling, if surprisingly aggressive, concept he rescued from one of his numbers in Ziegfeld’s Smiles (despite its cheery name, the show was a flop).
Besides the musical numbers, Top Hat’s biggest draws are Carroll Clark and Van Nest Polglase’s elaborate sets. Depression-era audiences longed for escape from dreary reality and the set department ensured they got their money’s worth. Jerry and Dale move from one Art Deco fantasy to another, first in London, where a translucent curtain gives the impression Dale is sleeping in the shade of a waterfall, and then in Venice, at a hotel that could only exist on a Hollywood soundstage: there’s a canal, complete with motorboats and gondolas, and a courtyard large enough to host a miniature carnival. Horace’s suite boasts trellises, gilded mirrors, scallop shell-backed couches and, fittingly, a silhouette of a clown. When Horton and his valet Eric Blore’s Jeeves and Wooster-lite banter peters out—the script is wafer-thin—and when Erik Rhodes, as another of Dale’s suitors, begins to grate, at least there’s something else to look at.
Top Hat is a collection of song-and-dance numbers strung together on a bedroom farce so frivolous it can barely support the weight. But with music and performances this lustrous, who cares? “Heaven, I’m in heaven,” Astaire sings. And for a little while, so are we.
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