The music is by Jerome Kern, from the Broadway play. What a flowering of musical talent show business produced between, say, 1925 and 1955. Composers and lyricists include Kern, George and Ira Gershwin, Yip Harburg, Charles Warren, Dorothy Fields, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Richard Rogers, and a horde of others. (It's surprising how many of them grew up at the same time in the same Brooklyn neighborhood.) Kern was the equal of any of them and though Roberta doesn't include his most original or memorable songs, those we do hear are both sonorous and technically adept.
But, the songs and dances are virtually the only good things in the movie. The story is plot bound, and is to the Astaire-Rogers series what "Room Service" is to the Marx Brothers. Otto Harback wrote the script for the play, mainly a contrast between stereotypical masculinity and feminine delicacy. (Randolph Scott, a former football player, inherits some kind of fashion business and feels his virility is compromised.) It makes for some heavy plodding in the film. Scott isn't nearly as enjoyable as he was in the later "Follow the Fleet," let alone straight comedies like, "The Awful Truth." Or even (dare I suggest it?) the priggish cowboy he played in the cheap Ranown movies of the 1950s -- "You make good coffee. Good-NIGHT, Mrs. Lowe." Or the best line Scott has ever uttered on screen about a beautiful woman -- "She ain't ugly." I gather the play, with its contrast in gender sensibilities, was a little more risqué than the film, but some of the humor survives: Astaire complaining into a phone that he's been running the fashion shop "for so long my voice is beginning to change."
Kern wrote eight songs for the play and four of them are included here: "Let's Begin," "I'll be Hard to Handle," "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes," and "Yesterdays." Two new Kern songs were brought in: "Lovely to Look At" and "I Won't Dance." The last may be the Astaire-Rogers signature tune. I know an institutionalized schizophrenic who shows the usual flat affect but who, every once in a while, begins to sing "I Won't Dance" in a peppy tempo.
Probably the two best dances are Astaire's solo in "I Won't Dance" and the pas de deux in "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes." In the first, Astaire is hauled to the foot of a staircase and goes into a spasm of twists, turns, and impossibly rapid taps, his arms flailing about as he twists and turns like a crazed marionette, managing to shake hands with someone in the process. Astaire always insisted on full body shots during the dance numbers and as few cuts as possible. There is only one cut in this scene. This is unquestionably one of his most distinctive solos. "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes", with Rogers, is slower but not moony. The rudimentary pulsing rhythm makes their simple dance together look positively elegant. If they were backed by a German band, there would be a tuba playing OOM-pah, OOM-pah in the arrangement. Rogers is remarkably supple. At one point Astair drapes her backward over his arm and she drapes her torso over it as if her spine were made not of bones but chondrocytes. They dance for two and a half minutes without a single cut in "Smoke Gets In Your Eyes." One false step and they'd have fallen all over each other and had to start from the beginning.
Worth seeing, but only for the songs.
But, the songs and dances are virtually the only good things in the movie. The story is plot bound, and is to the Astaire-Rogers series what "Room Service" is to the Marx Brothers. Otto Harback wrote the script for the play, mainly a contrast between stereotypical masculinity and feminine delicacy. (Randolph Scott, a former football player, inherits some kind of fashion business and feels his virility is compromised.) It makes for some heavy plodding in the film. Scott isn't nearly as enjoyable as he was in the later "Follow the Fleet," let alone straight comedies like, "The Awful Truth." Or even (dare I suggest it?) the priggish cowboy he played in the cheap Ranown movies of the 1950s -- "You make good coffee. Good-NIGHT, Mrs. Lowe." Or the best line Scott has ever uttered on screen about a beautiful woman -- "She ain't ugly." I gather the play, with its contrast in gender sensibilities, was a little more risqué than the film, but some of the humor survives: Astaire complaining into a phone that he's been running the fashion shop "for so long my voice is beginning to change."
Kern wrote eight songs for the play and four of them are included here: "Let's Begin," "I'll be Hard to Handle," "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes," and "Yesterdays." Two new Kern songs were brought in: "Lovely to Look At" and "I Won't Dance." The last may be the Astaire-Rogers signature tune. I know an institutionalized schizophrenic who shows the usual flat affect but who, every once in a while, begins to sing "I Won't Dance" in a peppy tempo.
Probably the two best dances are Astaire's solo in "I Won't Dance" and the pas de deux in "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes." In the first, Astaire is hauled to the foot of a staircase and goes into a spasm of twists, turns, and impossibly rapid taps, his arms flailing about as he twists and turns like a crazed marionette, managing to shake hands with someone in the process. Astaire always insisted on full body shots during the dance numbers and as few cuts as possible. There is only one cut in this scene. This is unquestionably one of his most distinctive solos. "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes", with Rogers, is slower but not moony. The rudimentary pulsing rhythm makes their simple dance together look positively elegant. If they were backed by a German band, there would be a tuba playing OOM-pah, OOM-pah in the arrangement. Rogers is remarkably supple. At one point Astair drapes her backward over his arm and she drapes her torso over it as if her spine were made not of bones but chondrocytes. They dance for two and a half minutes without a single cut in "Smoke Gets In Your Eyes." One false step and they'd have fallen all over each other and had to start from the beginning.
Worth seeing, but only for the songs.