Review of Top Hat (1935) by Emanuel D — 12 Jun 2007

When my parents use a metaphor for a film too old to watch, they say Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers are in it. Since I watch silent films with relish, Astaire and Rogers singing and danching cheek to cheek are postively contemporary from my point of view though there are many ways one is reminded these swingers were kicking about 15 years before my parents were born.

?Top Hat? is great fun. The two dancers defy gravity in a way that looks improbable to eyes who have seent he making of Hong King wire-fu movies. There is a grace and ease that is not of this world. The smiling and cheering of dancers who should be sweating and panting from the physical exertion is as unreal as everything else about the story that is told. But this is really happen, for a 1935 camera without cuts and edits does not lie.

Beyond the dancing there?s very little to write home about. The plot is as silly as they come and probably would not pass the morning conference of script writers of a bad Argentinian soap. What?s so dissonant to our post-war (post-several wars) eyes is that everyone seems so damn happy: they have so much to smile and dance and sing about. Don?t these people pay bills?

In reality that is what this film is meant to do: let us look into a world without worries. Those looking at it first time round in 1935 had much to worry about. They are the people of Grapes of Wrath and of Modern Times: the depressees who lost everything and could afford no luxury but the movies every week.

Musicals gave them a magical world they could escape to and if that magical world was anything like reality it would not be worth paying the ticket for.

I suppose if you wanted to tell a story where people break into song and dance every few minutes, you could not really have much to do with reality even if you wanted to.

Consider the set for what is meant to look like Venice in the second half of the film. It looks like something out of a Disney park: an American interpretation of a long-ago seen post-card retold and magnified to seem even more otherworldly in children?s eyes than Venice in any case really is.

Though you?ll raise your eye brows a few times at the sheer improbability of the plot turns and you won?t laugh the second time the characters take a Stan Laurel double-take (today?s humour is too fast to leave place for people who expect to be funny because they?re slow on the uptake) you can?t help smiling when they?re dancing. The sheer joy of Astaire and Rogers in their art form is infectious.