Word: vernon
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...became by far the most celebrated dancing personages of their era. They popularized the Maxixe, the One-Step, the Castle Walk. They opened a chain of four ballrooms and made about $15,000 a week. When Irene Castle bobbed her hair, a million other U. S. women aped her. Vernon Castle enlisted in the Royal Flying Corps in 1916. When he was killed in a crash at Fort Worth, Tex., on Feb. 15, 1918, the Castles' career became a legend, commemorated by a dance craze that is not over...
...Castles starts when Vernon (Fred Astaire) is working as stooge in a revue sketch with Lew Fields (Lew Fields). When he meets Irene Foote (Ginger Rogers), daughter of a New Rochelle doctor, he is first horrified by her amateurish version of Bessie McCoy's Yama Yama dance, then by her brash assumption, after watching him cut loose with a few tap steps on the station platform, that the future holds more for him than a putty nose...
...sensation of the Castles' debut a year later is adroitly prefaced with sequences showing Vernon Castle teaching his new wife his routine and then failing utterly to impress Fields; the genesis of the tip-toe Castle Walk, designed not to disturb the occupants of the Paris apartment below their own; and their meeting with Maggie Sutton (Edna May Oliver), who gets them their first engagement in return for a dinner...
...sound track-In My Merry Oldsmobile, By the Light of the Silvery Moon, Waiting for the Robert E. Lee, Oh, You Beautiful Doll and a dozen others-are calculated to evoke an era when alligators lived only in swamps, or zoos. And they succeed so completely that when Vernon Castle's plane crashes at Fort Worth, even the inevitable closing shot, in which Irene tells the band to keep on playing, acquires dignity...
American Girl. To say that Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers are well fitted to fill the Castles' dancing slippers is an understatement. Astaire and Rogers symbolize their era quite as completely as the Castles symbolized theirs. Astaire, born Austerlitz in Omaha, is eleven years younger than Vernon Castle. With his sister Adele, now Lady Cavendish, he was the top U. S. stage dancer of the 1920s. With Ginger Rogers he has been the top cinema dancer of the 1930s. In popularity, proficiency, appearance and earning capacity, Ginger Rogers is at least the equal of Irene Castle in her best...