USA 101m Dir: Mark Sandrich Key Cast: Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers
Top Hat is perhaps the most famous of the ten films that starred one of the Hollywood's most famous on-screen couples, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.
Though it's largely about the singing and dancing, there is a screwball comedy plot to the film. The premise is that Jerry (Astaire) falls in love with Dale (Rogers) but due to a case of mistaken identity she believes he is married man Horace (Edward Everett Horton). When Jerry heads to Venice to meet Dale she is furious at the way he courts her because she believes he is married and many hi-jinks ensue.
The plot is absurd and feels incredibly unlikely- surely one of them would have realised what was going on long before the end of the film? It just about gets away with the story though with Astaire being the witty and slightly chaotic leading man that was a common troupe of 30s films.
It's interesting to compare this film with the Busby Berkeley musicals that were biggest a few years before. They certainly share a lot of DNA (there's even one overhead dance number here) but there are some differences. The Berkeley musicals were all about spectacle with a large cast doing big musical numbers. There are several scenes here with extra dancers here but generally the musical numbers are much small and more intimate with Astaire and Rogers together. It feels somehow more sophisticated and relies more on the abilities of it's leading actors. Both are excellent dancers and Astaire's tap work here is incredible.
I've never been a huge fan of Irving Berlin's songs, as iconic as many of them became. He wasn't a trained musician- he didn't even know musical notation when making this film, needing an assistant to write down the tunes in his head. The most famous songs from this film are "Top Hat, White Tie and Tails" and "Cheek to Cheek" (I certainly recognised the latter). I find that his songs don't have much of a melody- they have close ties to jazz and like that genre often drift from thought to thought without making any climax.
Personally, I'm not much of a musicals fan and don't get the enjoyment out of the dancing that some do but it's still hard not to look at the stars of this film and understand they really had something special.
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