The Great Depression was a great time for Hollywood musicals, providing the perfect excuse for the impoverished masses to fill the studios’ coffers by indulging in the most escapist of all genres. Yet, that same Great Depression was always in the background. In some cases, like with Gold Diggers of 1933, it served as an integral part of the plot and sometimes even crept into more escapist and fantasy-like musicals like Swing Time.
Swing Time is a 1936 film directed by George Stevens and is often hailed as the best of all collaborations between legendary screen dancers Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. The plot begins when John “Lucky” Garnett (played by Astaire), a gambler and member of a dance troupe, is about to marry his fiancée Margaret Watson (played by Betty Furness). His colleagues bet that he won’t get married and sabotage the event by making Lucky late for the wedding. Margaret’s father (played by Landers Stevens) decides to give him another chance and will allow Margaret to marry him, but only after Lucky earns $25,000. He and magician Edwin “Pop” Cardetti (played by Victor Moore), his best friend, hop on a train to New York City in search of a job. There they meet the beautiful dance instructor Penelope “Penny” Carroll (played by Rogers), towards whom Lucky becomes so attracted that he feigns a lack of dance skill only to get a dance lesson from her. When he finally shows his true skills, both Lucky and Penny are booked as dancers at the Silver Sandal club. But there they experience a problem, because the band leader Ricardo “Ricky” Romero (played by Georges Metaxa) refuses to play unless Penny agrees to marry him.
Most Astaire-Rogers musicals have a rather thin plot, but few such plots are as weak as in the case of Swing Time. The script, written by two credited and four uncredited writers, offers a generic “boy meets girl” story, burdened with clichés and some implausibilities (like a band leader in an elite club very unprofessionally refusing to perform for petty personal reasons). The script, on the other hand, has a few interesting details. Astaire plays a protagonist who could easily pass as an antihero in films by more cynical authors; he earns his living through gambling, occasionally helped by his friend’s deception, and actually can’t make up his mind whether to pursue marriage with Margaret or romance with Penny. It could be suggested that such caddish behaviour is a reflection of Great Depression realities that often forced people to take actions from the other side of morality or legality. The scene in which Lucky hops on a freight train in his wedding dress and continues his travel as a hobo could be interpreted as a sort of ironic commentary on the state of the USA at the time.
But all that mattered little for the film as a whole. What attracted the audience was another opportunity to see Astaire and Rogers dance. Here they do it with perfection, performing a number of imaginative sequences accompanied by very good songs composed by Jerome Kern with lyrics written by Dorothy Fields. The best known of those songs is “The Way You Look Tonight”, which became the biggest hit of Kern’s career, won an Oscar for Best Original Song, and is nowadays known for its use in the finale episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.
The most impressive sequence, which Astaire choreographed together with Hermes Pan, is “Bojangles of Harlem”, in which Astaire dances together with three of his shadows on the wall. It is, however, also the most controversial scene of Astaire’s career because Astaire performs in blackface. This detail, which would be very insensitive in our times, is the reason why Swing Time appears seldom on television; it is somewhat ironic, because the sequence was explicitly designed as a tribute to the famous African-American tap dancer Bill Robinson.
Those viewers who care little about “political correctness” would, on the other hand, find other reasons not to be too enthusiastic about this film, most notably its somewhat slow beginning and having to wait almost half an hour before the first major dance number. Despite those flaws, Swing Time is a very good film and its high standing among Astaire-Rogers fans is quite understandable, although Top Hat with its much tighter plot and characters is much better.
RATING: 7/10 (+++)
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