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SMOKIN': Astaire-Rogers chemistry a beautiful thing to watch
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Published: August 16, 2009
When people fall in love, they choose an experience that others have had before. Very often that's what they have in mind: They would like to share some of what happened to Romeo and Juliet, or Lizzy and Darcy or maybe just their parents. One of those archetypes of romance was born 75 years ago, with the release of The Gay Divorcee, starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.
Dancing together, Astaire and Rogers expressed many of love's moods: courtship and seduction, repartee and responsiveness, teasing and challenge, the surprise of newfound harmony, the happy recapture of bygone romance, the giddy exhilaration of high spirits and intense mutual accord, the sense of a perfect balance of power, the tragedy of parting and, not least, the sense of love as role playing. It's startling how many of those shades are already present in "Night and Day," their first romantic duet together, in The Gay Divorcee.
The story has often been told. Astaire (1899-1987), after years of partnering with his sister, Adele, broke through to a new romantic seriousness in 1932 when partnering with Claire Luce onstage in London in Cole Porter's Gay Divorce, particularly in the number "Night and Day." He went to Hollywood as a fully grown star in 1933. When he and Rogers (1911-95) were given fifth- and fourth-star billing in RKOs Flying Down to Rio that year, their brief fling in the "Carioca" number became its biggest sensation.
The Gay Divorce was promptly adapted for the screen as The Gay Divorcee for the new star team. Astaire and Rogers went on to make seven more RKO movies together in the 1930s. Astaire choreographed, and the specifications he made for how the camera should follow him set unsurpassed standards: Film the dancers full-frame, without close-up; keep reaction shots to a minimum; run the dance in as few takes as possible, preferably just one.
Watching "Night and Day" as danced by Astaire and Rogers in The Gay Divorcee, we see the Astaire-Rogers alchemy in full force. Much of it has to do with Rogers' multifaceted reactions to Astaire.
Her face is riveting because it has such restraint. Among the breathtaking aspects of her performance are her sudden stops to address him (as if acknowledging the force field between them); the suggestions that at one point she is helplessly sleepwalking but that, at another, having great fun; the very sweet way she implies that love (and dancing with a partner) is something she is happily learning as she goes along. Her responses, from face to foot, give this duet its depth.
Two years after The Gay Divorcee, Rogers reached her apogee in Swing Time (1936). By now she has a dancer's body as beautiful as any the screen has ever seen. The glimpses of her legs in their "Pick Yourself Up" number (her calf-length skirts fly as they tap) are enough to make you gasp. Her spine can now arch and bend in many ways, all apparently full of feeling; the slenderness of her waist is always ravishing.
Her ordinariness and spontaneity (just watch her arms and hands) are central to her attractiveness. While she always retains these qualities, there are parts of Swing Time (and other Astaire-Rogers movies of their prime) in which they become divinities and, together, epitomize glamour, love and dance.
It's my impression that Astaire and Rogers have become even more classic than ever. Now that ballroom dance has been repopularized by So You Think You Can Dance, the Astaire-Rogers image is often invoked. Burn the Floor, the skillfully repellent stage musical currently on Broadway which features 16 stars of So You Think, has an episode in which one couple and then another appear dressed as Astaire and Rogers, with the music quoting their "Let's Face the Music and Dance" number from the 1936 Follow the Fleet.
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