Word: gingering
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...weeks of rehearsal before every film, dozens of takes, worn-out shoes, bleeding feet. In 1981, Astaire looked back on his career for a TIME story I wrote. (I've borrowed some of that piece for this one). He told Correspondent Martha Smilgis that making the Fred-and-Ginger films was like "running the four-min. mile for six months. I'd lose 15 lbs. during rehearsal. But then you'd get in a winning groove - a kind of show-business dream sequence where you can't do anything wrong. The choreography was a mutual effort: Hermes Pan, Ginger, even...
...titles of their RKO movies changed - "Flying Down to Rio," "The Gay Divorc?e," "Top Hat," "Roberta," "Follow the Fleet," "Swing Time," "Shall We Dance," "Carefree," "The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle" - but their roles were pretty constant. Fred was nature's nobleman, Ginger the plucky girl who made good by dancing well. It didn't matter that the films' plots were aggressively silly, the dialogue often inane. The musical numbers had a formula too: Fred courting Ginger, pursuing her in song and dance, while she ponders her ethical or emotional reservations to dancing-romancing; he approaches, she retreats...
...know some people who think Ginger didn't do it all - at least not at all well. I sat with Davie Lerner, once a dancer with the New York City Ballet and long an amatory scholar of dance in all its forms, and watched "Isn't It a Lovely Day" from "Top Hat." Davie couldn't withhold his informed scorn about Rogers' performance: she can't make the leap, her gestures lack refinement, she's looking at her feet - she's looking at his feet! I confess the experience was deflating, like getting severe criticism of your girl friend from...
...Someone (many people) noted that Ginger did everything Fred did, only backward and in high heels. That's not quite true. She didn't choreograph; she didn't drive the movie and the performers. And even I can see that, though Rogers was in Astaire's dancing class (as a precocious student), she wasn't in his dancing class (as an equal). His gestures are indeed larger, more precise and graceful, than hers. But ultimately that doesn't trouble me. The story of the films is one of aristocratic Fred elevating shopgirl Ginger to his level, and of Ginger bringing...
...from "Carefree," which is also the choice of Entertainment Weekly's Ty Burr. I love "Pick Yourself Up," another you-hate-me-now-but-when-we-dance-you'll-like me number, from "Swing Time." And I can't imagine a more beautiful expression of reluctant rapture than Ginger's in the "Cheek to Cheek" dance from "Top Hat." And not just the song (Berlin's finest) or the dance (one of Astaire's most brilliant). I'm thinking of the coda: a startlingly suspenseful 12 seconds of silence as Ginger considers the ecstasy she has just shared with...