Heaven, I'm In Heaven: Fred & Ginger's 10 Films

Heaven, I’m in Heaven

Fred & Ginger’s 10 Films 

(Or -- How Singing and Dancing Helped Save the Nation 
During The Shared-Shoes and Fake Socks 
Economy of The Great Depression)

An elegant and fun bridge between old and new.

In the 21^st century, dancers are athletic, ripped and gorgeous.  They do superhuman things.  We watch them with awe.  I don’t know about you, but when I watch a current dancer, I don’t feel myself performing that dance because it’s so far beyond me.  I watch as a spectator.  With Fred and Ginger, they look almost normal, sort of human.  Their dances can be felt.  It’s a dream-come-true moment of accessible elegance. 

Recently, I was with a Millennial who was not familiar with these movies.  I showed her one.  She wanted another.  Then another, and another.  We watched eight before we ran out of time.  She loved them.  I love them.  You will love them.  You can enjoy watching these movies!  In fact, I’m pretty confident that you will LOVE them; that you will want to binge-watch them.  I expect that they will become internalized into the very fabric of your personality. 

I will write a little something about each of the ten films, like a 21^st century tourist’s guide book to the 1930s.  I will link to a clip from each one.  I encourage you to then find the entire film to enjoy at your leisure.  They are on streaming services, uploaded online, available for rent, plus found on DVD, perhaps even at your public library. 

These Astaire/Rogers films from the 1930s are timeless silver, black and white visual masterpieces.  They are 80+ years old now and yet should fully own a place in the 21^st century.  They are art.  If you want fantasy and romance, elegance and artistry, silliness and comedy, beauty and style, music and love, stay with us and enjoy these films.

These were “RKO Radio Pictures” – “Radio” because you could LISTEN to them!  They were modern because they were NOT silent films!  Yes, that’s how old they are!  Pictures with soundtracks were still quite new (which you will recall if know the plot of the Gene Kelly film “Singin’ In The Rain” about the 1920s shift to sound films). 

Magical dance teams don’t come along very often.  When we watch Astaire and Rogers, we realize that they look perfect together.  Others are amazing, and over the years Fred had many partners.  But this team is iconic.

There have been brilliant dancers over the years, each inspired by the one before.  They all circle back to Fred.  Clear from today on back.  Michael Kidd, Jerome Robbins, Gene Kelly shone alone or with anyone, Vera Ellen with Danny Kaye (or anyone else), Donald O’Connor, Shirley Temple, Bojangles Robinson, Fred Astaire with Eleanor Powell, Barrie Chase, Cyd Charise, Marge and Gower Champion, Debbie Reynolds, Ann Miller, Leslie Caron, Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon, Sammy Davis Jr., Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore, Gregory Hines, James Brown, Jennifer Lopez, Michael Jackson and on to those like Usher, Andy Blankenbeuhler and the list goes on, and all are breathtaking.  In fact, Michael Jackson and Beyoncé were inspired by Bob Fosse, who was following in the footsteps of Fred.  It all circles back to Fred.

However (and a big however), Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in the 1930s had something special that wasn’t even hinted at again for decades.  To be honest, no one has really ever repeated it.  These are so much fun to watch.  They created the look.  

The way they speak in these films sounds a little fake and put-on. That's because it was.  The actors of the 1930s early talking pictures had to take elocution and diction lessons.  They softened their Rs and spoke a little bit posh.  Now it sounds pretentious.  Back then it sounded lovely.

It’s important to realize that these are dancing musical stories.  The songs and dances are not illogical misfit moments, but are integral to plot development.  This is often true of songs in musicals, but here the dances do it too.  Each dance in each movie tells some segment of the story or establishes something new about character development.  For this reason, (among others) they are choreographically artistic landmarks as “interpretive dance.”

My Mom was born 100+ years ago.  RKO Studio was part of my mother’s world.  Her name was Bo.  She was a teenage protégé musician in Los Angeles in the 1930s.  Bo worked as a professional pianist and accompanied dance lessons, vocal coaching and auditions as part of the Hollywood Studio System world while she was still in high school.  My mother played the piano as easily as breathing and her brilliant impromptu stylings of The Great American Songbook standards were a part of our daily home life.  Many of those songs were introduced in these films.

Bo in the 1930s

Romance (along with poverty) is forever linked to the 1930s in my family.  While all this film fantasy was swirling around her, the reality was The Great Depression, where her high school piano playing jobs helped support her impoverished family.  My parents met on a blind date in 1935 (set-up by his older sister) and they eloped in 1936. 

Bo with her beau, my father, circa 1936

These movies have costumes and sets that are pure fantasy.  Please keep in mind that these fabulous clothes and locations are in a film made in the midst of The Great Depression, with massive unemployment, poverty, failure and even starvation.  My father and his younger brother lived together in a boarding house after their parents had died.  They didn't have money for nice wardrobe items so they shared a pair of decent shoes, which meant only one of them could go out on any given evening.  My mother wore a homemade hand-me-down dress to the Hollywood piano jobs she had.  Even bobby-socks were hard to come by those days.  If her socks wore out, she cut the cuffs off and wore them around her ankles anyway, just to look like she had socks on.  In the midst of a shared-shoes and fake-socks economy, these movies' fabulous wardrobes were part of the escapist fantasy the nation craved.  Going to the movies cost a dime, and was more fun than a new pair of bobby socks.

My credentials?  I danced just enough to be able to recognize how brilliant A&R's dances were, and how difficult.  

No doubt my biggest credential is that my parents were OLDER than everyone else’s because they got me really late in life.  My folks were young adults when these films were made.  For the rest of their lives my parents and their friends would don beautiful gowns and tuxedos and go on dancing dates, even into their 70s.  They lived the life!  This was their era, and they shared it with me.

When I was young my mother and I would watch these films together.  Ancient history – that was actually before anyone had a way to rent, stream or record movies, so if a film was shown on TV at an odd hour, that was the only chance to view it.  VHF stations (the weird little odd TV channels of San Francisco) would show Fred & Ginger movies sometimes between midnight and 4 AM.  We’d read the TV schedules in the Sunday newspaper to try and find these films.  We'd set our alarms (even on a school night) and get up and watch together.  Mother-daughter bonding.  We also sought out film festivals which were not unusual in the artsy Bay Area and allowed us to see the films on the big screen as intended when they were made.  Now I own them all, a brilliant gift from my husband, beautifully restored and preserved.

The films are, in chronological order:

Flying Down To Rio (RKO 1933)

The Gay Divorcee (RKO 1934)

Roberta (RKO 1935)

Top Hat (RKO 1935)

Follow the Fleet (RKO 1936)

Swing Time (RKO 1936)

Shall We Dance (RKO 1937)

Carefree (RKO 1938)

The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle (RKO 1939)

The Barkleys of Broadway (MGM 1949)

Each one has a post.  Click on Older Post below (or the > if you're reading this on a mobile screen) to find them in the order the films were made.  

Join me!  Welcome to this bridge between old and new.