They don’t make ’em like they used to
- Swing Time is playing at Metro Cinemas tonight at 7:00 and 9:10 p.m.
Ideally, this is how you write a musical: take a story and give it to a talented songwriter and lyricist who write beautiful music complete with lyrics that actually make sense. Otherwise known as a “book musical,” this results in a coherent narrative with songs that serve as a delightful extension of the plot (e.g., Oklahoma, Guys and Dolls).
Recently, this formula has shifted to become something else entirely, namely that of taking already popular songs and mashing them into a hackneyed plot that comes to a screeching halt every time a song begins. (Mamma Mia, I’m talking to you.)
Thankfully, the 1936 Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musical Swing Time falls into the former category and tonight, for one night only, it’s playing on the big screen at Metro Cinemas. Swing Time has been a favorite of mine ever since I was ten and my mother introduced me to old films as a way of diverting my attention from early ’90s movies like The Silence of the Lambs and Die Hard 2: Die Harder. Her trick worked and I’ve been watching old musicals ever since.
Swing Time is sixth of ten Astaire and Rogers films, and like all them, displays a type of quirky, heavy-handed charm that is hard not to love. Astaire plays a gambler named Lucky who falls for Rogers (as the aptly-named Penny) despite being engaged to someone else. Stock characters abound, the plot takes some truly daring leaps, and most of the “jokes” are not funny at all. But none of that matters.
The film’s six dance numbers show Astaire and choreographer Hermes Pan at their height; the songs, written by Jerome Kern with lyrics by Dorothy Fields are so terrific that many of them went on to be sung by people with far better voices (The Way You Look Tonight, A Fine Romance). And as always, Ms. Rogers’ gowns are so lovely that they make me want to reconfigure my wardrobe to include stolen articles from the Met’s Costume Institute.
In an amusingly self-referential nod, this film has Ginger Rogers playing a dancing instructor at the very type of dancing school that emerged in the 1930s to sate the public’s desire to emulate none other than Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.
Regrettably, the film also includes Astaire’s only performance in black face: “Bojangles of Harlem,” a elaborate tribute to the dancer and actor, Bill Robinson. (Cringe worthy yes, but no more so than film performances of Robinson himself during the same time period–characters that are both painful stereotypes and woefully sell short Robinson’s talent. Worse yet, many of these roles were played alongside another embarrassment of early Hollywood: Shirley Temple.)
Swing Time is worth watching for its simultaneous campiness and elegance, for its music and dancing. It’s worth watching merely to marvel at the fact that only nine years into making talking pictures, this is what was being accomplished. Suffice to say, I’ll be at the seven o’clock show surreptitiously eating cookies out of my purse and humming along to every song.
