Grimerlana Plenty to Like, Plenty to Dislike

Pluskylang Great Film overall

Animenter There are women in the film, but none has anything you could call a personality.

AutCuddly Great movie! If you want to be entertained and have a few good laughs, see this movie. The music is also very good,

JLRVancouver Fred and Ginger dance – that pretty much sums it up. The plot, the standard 'mistaken identity' shtick, allows the stars to meet cute and the supporting team to provide comic relief but is really just an excuse to string together a number of great musical numbers, including the iconic "Dancing cheek to cheek" (feathers and all). Edward Everett Horton is great as Astaire's buddy and mistaken alter-ego (I can't hear his voice without thinking about "Fractured Fairy Tales"), as is Helen Broderick, who plays his flippant wife. This is a film full of tuxedos and gowns, spontaneous yet fully orchestrated singing, extravagant sets, improbable situations, silly but endearing double takes, and Astaire's classic mix of graceful, athletic dancing. "Top Hat" is all romantic fantasy with not a hint of intruding reality and as such, it's perfect way to pass a couple of hours.

SnoopyStyle American performer Jerry Travers (Fred Astaire) is in London to work for lovable producer Horace Hardwick. Jerry starts dancing up a storm in his hotel room annoying Dale Tremont (Ginger Rogers) in the room below. She goes upstairs to complain. Jerry falls for her immediately while she mistakes him for Horace who is married to her friend Madge. He follows her and the Hardwicks to Venice where she's modeling for Italian designer Alberto Beddini.This has Fred and Ginger at their finest with music from Irving Berlin. It can't miss. "I'm in heaven." The story is a simple comedy of errors and misunderstandings. It's fun enough and good enough. The dance numbers are good. There are big ones but it's still the simple Fred and Ginger dance that is the best. This is a nice example of a good ole song and dance from that era.

utgard14 Dancer Fred Astaire and model Ginger Rogers meet and immediately fall in love. But when Ginger mistakenly believes Fred is married to her friend, she wants nothing more to do with him. Okay, not the most original plot you'll ever see. Mistaken identity plots were pretty common then (and still show up today). But it's handled well and never feels contrived. This is my favorite Fred & Ginger movie. Both are in top form with wonderful timing and chemistry. Great comedic support from Edward Everett Horton, Eric Blore, Helen Broderick, and a scene-stealing Erik Rhodes ("Never again will I allow women to wear my dresses!"). Songs include the classic "Cheek to Cheek" and the underrated "The Piccolino." The dance numbers are exceptional. Ginger's beautiful, even in that feather dress that Fred Astaire hated so much. Everything works in this one. The comedy, the romance, the songs, the dancing -- it's all perfect.

chaos-rampant Well, to get an impression of where I stand when I dismiss the musical aspects of this film, Fred and Ginger are, next to William Powell and Myrna Loy, the most watchable, most cinematic on-screen couple of the decade—urbane, witty, effortless. It is not their dancing together that impresses, not for me. Fred has done much better dancing in Easter Parade. The staging is most of the time uninteresting, spotlight on them, dull camera. And they are not what you would call superb actors by the contemporary sense of the term.It is the bubble of spontaneity and feigned amazement, the air of pleasant light friction they manage to sustain between them; a sense of soft clouds gliding against each other, the rain and lightning all for show.As said, the musical aspect doesn't touch me, it seems onedimensional— give me the self-reflexive dance in layers of something like Busby's Footlight Parade. What IS interesting about this, and their cinematic coupling in general, is that it is so much more than a cocktail party, that would be William and Myrna's charm (do see The Thin Man if you haven't). It will seem superficial at first, indeed most viewers have dismissed the story as a trifle rehash of their Gay Divorcée. It was probably seen as harmless at the time. The thing is basically a screwball with a few numbers.It probably excites me and not others, because my ongoing premise is that each film right down to the most crude, can be understood as a consciousness at the mercy of images it creates—the fun all in riding whims of perception as they enter the fray and stitch illusion.Let me unspool a bit of what goes on in the story to illustrate that. You have two lovers who curiously explore each other. We know they are destined, audiences knew then, it's as if they are already together and all this is being reflected back on. The place is Venice, the Hollywood studio version—the perfect scenery for embellishment and dreamlike digress, because it is so falsely idyllic. It really is an amazing set; imagine being a studio carpenter and going to work there every morning, what bliss..Now as fate would have it, there is the misunderstanding (mistaken identity) and all it kicks off. This is mirrored in a friendly couple, where imagined adultery is actually real and comes to the surface. You have the Italian dressmaker and annoying manservant as comic relief, both of whom act roles at one point or other, incidentally both are celibates so without anchor. On a third level, you have both lovers fabricating a supposed shared memory from the past, with Fred's, here's the magic of the couple in full effect, slyly improvised on the spot on top of Ginger's.Fateful changing of selves; splintered, older version of the reality of the characters; and third parallel mirror in obviously fabricated memory about veiled sex, which is at the core of everything. In Fred's story, he supposedly met Ginger years ago in Paris, who was going then by Madeleine—'Mad' in short as he calls her.How can anyone who has intimately known Vertigo see this and not sit back? Can't we say that some things enter the vocabulary with such power they transform in retrospect everything else?Oh, the abstraction is empty as we have it. This is a comedy, so we have too much control of the plot. There are whims in perception, but we are never lost. And all of it has been so deftly annotated since Vertigo and on, that there's nothing to take from it anymore, the next two or three steps have been taken. But there must have been a window, say no more than 10 years, when this really tickled the imagination and opened portals.