Top Hat
Released 1935, directed by Mark Sandrich
Pure pleasure giving is rare as an artistic goal in films, and even most commercial products tend to approach pleasure as something to be stimulated indirectly. As a narrative form film has constraints – a film is a whole, enduring through time, whereas pleasure tends to be either pinpoint or anodyne (for the anodyne version watch a movie targeted solely at young children). Musicals are not an exception to these constraints, but they have more tools to navigate them than other formats; and among musicals Rogers and Astaire’s nine Depression-era films are exceptionally escapist – compare them to the works Rodgers and Hammerstein, which came only a little but later but belong firmly to the Post-War world, with its sober acknowledgement of evil; even their most direct example of wish-fulfilment, The Sound of Music, is after all absolutely crawling with Nazis.
Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire often visit Europe, but no Nazis are encountered. In fact there is little true foreignness on display (although there are accents) – the point is the whiz and glamor of sophisticated travel, leavened by the fact that everything is being simulated on vast Hollywood soundstages (including the accents). Top Hat, their top earner, begins in England (with a witty zoom out from a top hat), and is inflected throughout with an English sense of inconsequence, a sense that life is all a series of etiquettical quibbles, and a playhouse for those who artfully bend the rules. In the first scene Astaire is waiting for a friend at a formal club; noise is banned, the members rotate their newspapers with skillful precision, but he can’t help but rustle and clatter. At first he seems cowed by the opprobrium, but this is only a put-on, a quick sampling of the ambient culture; when it’s time for him to leave he exits with a thunderous tap step.
He is playing Jerry Travers, professional dancer, and the plot is and is meant to be at the level of an emcee’s patter between acts. Jerry desires Dale Tremont (Ginger Rogers), yet there are obstacles: at first she does not desire him, and then she thinks he is married, and then she gets married; but Jerry forces through. Here the upsides and downsides of a hedonic art are clearly visible – even as the forward rush of the narrative is pleasant, the spring of insistence required to make it go is tiring. Astaire thought so as well, calling the character as initially scripted “a sort of objectional young man without any charm or sympathy or humor” (this is among other things a fascinating glimpse into how the problematic nature of certain romcom tropes was evident from the beginning, and perhaps an indication of how much of their persistence is structural). Script doctors were brought in, and in the final version Jerry is granted at least some charm and sympathy and humor; but the metaphysic of the character can’t be altered. He has to keep things moving, and sometimes that’s objectionable.
The point of the movement is to get us to the movement, the song and dance. Irving Berlin provided thirteen songs for the score, of which only five were used in the final product. These five all share a blunt dreaminess, a heavy-man-who’s-light-on-his-feet quality; and crest of course with Cheek to Cheek, which fully unlocks that dichotomy’s inherent poignancy, ascending to proclaim the singer in heaven before gravity takes over and, on the downslope, he confesses that he only seems to find the happiness he seeks. Cheek to Cheek is in three parts (A-A-B-C-A), with the B and C parts both being pastiche, B of jauntiness and C of passion; all of the true, authentically mixed emotion is in the perfect phrase beginning Heaven…
Likewise there is no emotion whatsoever in the film aside from that expressed in the dance numbers – and there is a logical consistency in this. The film conceives of dance as a terminal intimacy, not a stepping stone on the path to sex but rather as a different but equally transcendent expression of closeness. When Jerry meets Dale he immediately asks her to dance – he is responding to her as dance partner, and in the world of Top Hat to be a good dance partner is to be a good partner in life. Moreover, because dance is more versatile than sex – capable of being casually public, serving a broader array of contexts – Jerry and Dale have, once they do begin to dance together, the possibility of a world more shot through with intimacy than we in our real world can achieve. This suffusion of a love that is honorable and public but not chaste is the sub-surface audience offering of the “dance” portion of a song and dance film; and within that sub-genre where the kids gotta dance but the adults don’t get it, what is being negotiated really is dance… But there’s none of that tension in Top Hat. Everything is good in Top Hat. When two men happen to kiss in a European eruption of feeling, a female onlooker (the great Helen Broderick) complaisantly remarks “Don’t mind me boys”.
The connective tissue between the various dance numbers is comedy – what else could it be? – and is comedy of an easy-flowing undemanding kind. There is rarely any build, since build requires the audience to expand effort in tracking a joke through multiple phases. Here for the most part each joke is self-contained and wham-bam, carefully packaged in a bracket of palette-cleansing silence. Edward Everett Horton, literally a specialist in double takes, is brought in to do double takes. At times a tentative interest in the more exotic forms of verbal play becomes apparent (Gertrude Stein is namechecked), and the best line is “My sister got into a hornets' nest and we rubbed HER with butter, sir!,” delivered in a fury by Eric Blore.
Other attractions are the costumes, the cavernous sets (most of the film’s budget was spent on sets, including a sizeable fake Venice, the canal water dyed black so as to pop on film), the sight of Fred Astaire walking around and performing other everyday motions (Rilke on a panther’s legs: “loaded with leaps”). He also dances. To watch an artist like Fred Astaire – as a non-specialist in their art – is in a sense to play a double game with oneself. There is a constant negotiation, a jostling between one’s own feeble perceptions (“he seems good”) and the advisings of a complex apparatus of critical opinion which would, if it could, act as an auxiliary organ of appreciation – but it can’t, and thus the determined rhythmic tapping of the elbow of edification against the rib of perception: this is transcendent, this is of deep cultural import, he is the Bach of dance (as per George Balanchine). You can agree completely with these encomiums, and can I think allow them to open your eyes a bit, to increase your appetite; still they are not a magic pill, which once swallowed will instantly refine your palette. There is an argument that a transcendent artist will have such a weight of merit that it will be communicated, one-way, into even the thickest of skulls - yet I doubt that. Some sandpapering of the cranium is required.
Astaire also sings – Berlin loved his singing, compact and often a bit strained, and the two became close during filming – and does jokes. His comedy is played as laid back, but he can’t hide his central aesthetic, which is that effort equals results. When he does lean into a line he can hit it so hard that it goes off at an unexpected angle, sometimes to good effect and sometimes to bad. Rogers meanwhile is self-contained. Her professionalism is more consummate and less fraught. She’s here to entertain, but to the appropriate degree – in fact her overall coolness may partially be a reaction to the gaps in her dancing abilities; Brian Seibet in his history of tap dancing (which I, the non-specialist, must rely upon) says she “conveyed a casualness that made her flaws winning,” and quotes a beautiful line from Arlene Croce: “She sometimes threw away stuff she never had.” This is very much against the spirit of Top Hat. Child of the Depression that it is, it throws away nothing, not even its throwaway gags (there are no throwaway gags it insists, only gags that need a little fixing up – a more knowing delivery, a broader leer). And as to whether one prefers this meticulous pursuit of pleasing us, or Rogers’s more as-it-is approach, that is in a sense even made moot: the film in its diligence provides both.
