A Damsel in Distress (1937)
What a strange film, comic and stylish, clumsy and inventive. Fred Astaire is key, but it might be the young Joan Fontaine who first caught my attention. She's not the refined actress she became for "Rebecca" but she has the demur naive thing starting. It turns out she can't dance, so that had to be worked around.
The movie is set in London in a kind of fakey way—the London fog is exaggerated to the point of comedy. But that's fair. It's a comedy. And a musical, of course, with Astaire's dance sections being the only real reason to admire an otherwise routine movie.
Not that there isn't an overload of talent here. George Burns and Gracie Allen are at it, in less than stellar form, but fun. We have George and Ira Gerswin for amazing music and lyrics overall. P.G. Wodehouse (of Jeeves fame) is the writer, no less, and it's funny. (It even has Astaire saying, "Right ho!" A famous Jeeves line.) All of this give the movie some panache.
But the story is thin and canned, and the direction bland. There are even painful gaps in editing and photography (the fog suddenly completely disappears in the middle of one of Astaire's wonderful dances, on an open street).
It's not a surprise the movie lost money. But even so, if you like Astaire, you should watch this. His famous dance near the end with the drum kit is great fun (if not the masterpiece others say it is) and in general when the movie breaks into song it's a good thing, an escape from the doldrums of the plot.
What a strange film, comic and stylish, clumsy and inventive. Fred Astaire is key, but it might be the young Joan Fontaine who first caught my attention. She's not the refined actress she became for "Rebecca" but she has the demur naive thing starting. It turns out she can't dance, so that had to be worked around.
The movie is set in London in a kind of fakey way—the London fog is exaggerated to the point of comedy. But that's fair. It's a comedy. And a musical, of course, with Astaire's dance sections being the only real reason to admire an otherwise routine movie.
Not that there isn't an overload of talent here. George Burns and Gracie Allen are at it, in less than stellar form, but fun. We have George and Ira Gerswin for amazing music and lyrics overall. P.G. Wodehouse (of Jeeves fame) is the writer, no less, and it's funny. (It even has Astaire saying, "Right ho!" A famous Jeeves line.) All of this give the movie some panache.
But the story is thin and canned, and the direction bland. There are even painful gaps in editing and photography (the fog suddenly completely disappears in the middle of one of Astaire's wonderful dances, on an open street).
It's not a surprise the movie lost money. But even so, if you like Astaire, you should watch this. His famous dance near the end with the drum kit is great fun (if not the masterpiece others say it is) and in general when the movie breaks into song it's a good thing, an escape from the doldrums of the plot.