Roberta 3

I've been watching Roberta again and I'm reminded of some of the reasons why I admire the "I'll Be Hard to Handle" dance number. Ginger dances beautifully in this number and arches her back gracefully at several points in dance. The dance ends exquisitely with a seemingly improvised drop into chairs at the side of the dance floor. Arlene Croce put it much better:

"'I'll be hard to handle' is the big event of the film, the number in which 'Fred and Ginger' become fixed screen deities. The wonderful secret they seemed to share in 'The Continental' becomes here a magical rapport that is sustained through what looks like sheerest improvisation. It begins with some light banter punctuated by dance breaks, continues with music and more dance breaks - tap conversation with each other taking eight-bar 'sentences' (his growing more impudent, hers more indignant) - and ends in a chain of turns across the floor and a flop into two chairs."

In his biography of Astaire, Tim Satchell says that in Roberta "for the first time, Astaire arranged that the dance sequences would be shot to his own specifications, with several cameras shooting one dance from several different angles and a whole sequence shot in one take, so that after editing there would be a continuity of movement on film."

Benny Green makes an excellent point about the democratic aspects of Roberta and other Astaire films. "The audience watching [Busby] Berkeley was dreaming of life in a never-never land; when it watched Fred and Ginger it was dreaming of its own existence."