Top Hat

Top Hat was released seventy years ago this week. Here is the review which appeared in Time magazine:

Top Hat (RKO). When Hollywood revived musical films three years ago, dancing was monopolized by Director Busby Berkely and his imitators. The height of their inventions was reached in Footlight Parade, which showed a chorus massed to represent the U. S. flag. When Dancer Fred Astaire first appeared in Hollywood, he was deemed too lacking in acting ability and sex appeal to do more than a momentary turn in Dancing Lady, for which Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer borrowed him from RKO. That bit made Astaire one of the five biggest box-office names in the
industry. Teamed with Ginger Rogers—an almost equally capable comedienne who had been overlooked for years for the same reasons—he has since made an estimated $10,000,000 for the company which had at first been happy to lend him to its
competitors. Finally, thanks more to Fred Astaire than any other single influence, the character of musicomedy in the cinema has now completely changed.

In Top Hat, Dancer Astaire obligingly continues to offer cinemaddicts an inventory of the proficiencies which made him a stage star for ten years before civilized dancing reached the cinema. The picture contains a dance on a sanded rug, designed as a lullaby for the lady (Ginger Rogers) who lives on the floor
below and who has gone upstairs to complain about the tap-dance that preceded it; an elaborate routine with male chorus, copied from one Astaire did in Smiles in 1930; a pretentious "Piccolino," which may or may not turn out to be the "Continental" of 1935-36. Possibly more ingratiating than any of these is an informal scene reminiscent of their best, in Roberta, showing Rogers & Astaire caught in a thunderstorm, arguing with each other by dancing.

The music which accompanies these exercises, all by Irving Berlin, contains such likely hits as Top Hat, White Tie and Tails; Cheek to Cheek and Isn't This a Lovely Day. The story shows Astaire as the U. S. star of a London revue trying hard to further a romance which begins when he keeps Miss Rogers awake and which is impeded only by her stubborn and illogical belief that he is her best friend's husband. Otherwise pleasantly negligible, the narrative has at least the merit of giving a cast of skilled comedians (Edward Everett Horton, Helen Broderick, Erik Rhodes and Eric Blore) a chance to be amusing when Astaire &
Rogers are out of breath.