Astaire, Fred (1899-1987), and Ginger Rogers (1911-1995)

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Astaire, Fred (1899-1987), and Ginger Rogers (1911-1995)

Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers were the greatest dance team in the history of American movies. In the course of developing their partnership and dancing before the movie camera they revolutionized the Hollywood musical comedy in the 1930s. Though their partnership only lasted for six years and nine films between 1933 and 1939, with a tenth film as an encore ten years later, they definitively set the standards by which dancing in the movies would be judged for a long time to come. Although they both had independent careers before and after their partnership, neither ever matched the popularity or the artistic success of their dancing partnership.

The dancing of Astaire and Rogers created a style that brought together dance movements from vaudeville, ballroom dancing, tap dancing, soft shoe, and even ballet. Ballroom dancing provided the basic framework—every film had at least one ballroom number. But tap dancing provided a consistent rhythmic base for Astaire and Rogers, while Astaire's ballet training helped to integrate the upper body and leaps into their dancing. Because Astaire was the more accomplished and experienced dancer—Rogers deferred to him and imitated him—they were able to achieve a flawless harmony. "He gives her class and she gives him sex," commented Katherine Hepburn. Astaire and Rogers developed their characters through the drive to dance that they exhibited and the obstacles, spatial distances, and social complications they had to surmount in order to dance. "Dancing isn't the euphemism for sex; in Astaire-Rogers films it is much better," wrote critic Leo Braudy. In their performances, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers suggested that dance is the perfect form of movement because it allows the self to achieve a harmonious balance between the greatest freedom and the most energy.

Astaire was born in Omaha, Nebraska in 1899. By the age of seven he was already touring the vaudeville circuit and made a successful transition to a dancing career on Broadway with his sister Adele in 1917. After Adele married and retired from the stage in 1932, Astaire's career seemed at a standstill. Despite the verdict on a screen test—"Can't act. Slightly bald. Can dance a little"—he made his first film appearance in Dancing Lady (1933) opposite Joan Crawford. Rogers, born in 1911 in Independence, Missouri, made her performing debut as a dancer in vaudeville—under the tutelage of her ambitious "stage" mother—at age 14. She first performed on Broadway in the musical Top Speed in 1929, and two years later headed out to Hollywood. She was under contract to RKO where she began her legendary partnership with Fred Astaire.

When sound came to film during the late 1920s, Hollywood studios rushed to make musicals. This created vast opportunities for musical comedy veterans like Astaire and Rogers. From the very beginning Astaire envisioned a new approach to filmed dancing and, together with Rogers, he exemplified a dramatic change in the cinematic possibilities of dance. Initially, the clumsiness of early cameras and sound equipment dictated straight-on shots of musical dance numbers from a single camera. These straight-on shots were broken by cutaways which would focus on someone watching the dance, then on the dancer's feet, next to someone watching, then back again to the dancer's face, concluding—finally—with another full-on shot. Thus, dances were never shown (or even filmed) in their entirety. Because of this, Busby Berkeley's big production numbers featured very little dancing and only large groups of dancers moving in precise geometric patterns.

Astaire's second movie, Flying Down to Rio (1933), was a glorious accident. It brought him together with Ginger Rogers. It also brought together two other members of the team that helped make Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers the greatest dance partnership in American movies—Hermes Pan who became Astaire's steady choreographic assistant, and Hal Borne, Astaire's rehearsal pianist and musical arranger. Before Flying Down to Rio, no one had ever seen an entire dance number on the screen. Starting with the famous "Carioca" number, Astaire and Pan began insisting that numbers should be shot from beginning to end without cutaways. Pan later related that when the movie was previewed "something happened that had never happened before at a movie." After the "Carioca" number, the audience "applauded like crazy."

The success of Flying Down to Rio and the forging of Astaire and Rogers' partnership established a set of formulas which they thoroughly exhausted over the course of their partnership. In their first six films, as Arlene Croce has noted, they alternated between playing the lead romantic roles and the couple who are the sidekicks to the romantic leads. Their second film, The Gay Divorcee (1934), was based on Astaire's big Broadway hit before he decided to go to Hollywood. It provides the basic shape of those movies in which Astaire and Rogers are the romantic leads—boy wants to dance with girl, girl does not want to dance with boy, boy tricks girl into dancing with him, she loves it, but she needs to iron out the complications. They consummate their courtship with a dance. Most Astaire and Rogers movies also played around with social class—there is always a contrast between top hats, tails, and evening gowns, and even their vernacular dance forms aimed at a democratic egalitarianism. These films were made in the middle of the Great Depression when movies about glamorous upper class people often served as a form of escape. Dancing is shown both as entertainment and an activity that unites people from different classes.

The standard complaint about Astaire and Rogers movies are that they do not have enough dancing. Amazingly, most of their movies have only about ten minutes of dancing out of roughly 100 minutes of running time. There are usually four to seven musical numbers in each film, although not all of them are dance numbers. On the average, a single dance takes approximately three minutes. Certainly, no one would ever watch most of those movies if they were not vehicles for the dancing of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. That these movies find viewers on the basis of no more than ten or 12 minutes of dancing suggests the deep and continuing pleasure that their performances give.

Each movie assembled several different types of dance numbers including romantic duets, big ballroom numbers, Broadway show spectacles, challenge dances, and comic and novelty numbers. In the best of the movies the song and dance numbers are integrated into the plot—Top Hat (1935), Swing Time (1936), Shall We Dance (1937). The centerpiece of most movies was the romantic duet. The incomparable "Night and Day" in The Gay Divorcee was the emotional turning point of the movie's plot. Other romantic duets like "Cheek to Cheek" in Top Hat and "Waltz" in Swing Time, are among the great romantic dance performances in movies. Some of the movies tried to replicate the success of the big ballroom number in Rio and the popularity of "Carioca" as a dance fad. Each movie also included an original variation on the different types of dances showcased in them. For example, "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off" in Shall We Dance included Astaire and Rogers dancing the entire routine on roller skates. "Pick Yourself Up" from Swing Time shows them using dance as an example of physical comedy: Astaire stumbles, falls, trips, and otherwise pretends he can not dance in order to flirt with Rogers, who teaches ballroom dancing. Another familiar genre is the "challenge" dance where Astaire does a step, Rogers imitates it, he does another, and then she tops it. Challenge dances usually played out Rogers' resistance to Astaire.

Shall We Dance (1937) has music and lyrics by George and Ira Gershwin including such well known songs as "They All Laughed," "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off," "They Can't Take that Away From Me," and "Shall We Dance." The movie stages an encounter between high art and popular forms of self-expression, ballet and tap dancing, and seriousness and fun. Astaire plays the Great Petrov, star of the Russian ballet, whose real name is Pete Peters, from Philadelphia. The film opens with Petrov's manager surprising him in the midst of tap dancing. The manager is horrified: "The Great Petrov doesn't dance for fun," he exclaims. Ballet is a serious business to which the artist must devote his full time, the manager explains. Shall We Dance mocks ballet and European culture, and offers up instead popular American dance forms. The encounter is first staged when Astaire and Rogers dance to "They All Laughed," another example of a challenge duet. Astaire begins with ballet-like steps while Rogers, feeling left out, stands still. She lightly snubs him by starting to tap. He responds with tap-like ballet, and then, at last, goes into straight tap dancing. Only then do they successfully dance together.

Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers had long careers after they had ceased dancing together. Rogers went on to expand her range. She was an excellent comedienne, and in 1940 won an Oscar for her dramatic role in Kitty Foyle. Astaire appeared in over 40 movies, and unlike Rogers, he continued to dance. Among his later partners were Rita Hayworth, Eleanor Powell, and Cyd Charisse. No other partnership, however, produced work of the artistic quality that he was able to achieve with Rogers. The dancing partnership of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers promised a kind of happiness in which two individuals are able to successfully combine freedom and fun.

—Jeffrey Escoffier