To set the context, by 1935 Ginger Rogers had delivered Busby Berkeley’s Golddiggers of 1933, in which she sings in Pig Latin sandwiched in a giant silver dollar, danced with Astaire in Top Hat, and did this weird thing called In Person. Directed by William Seiter, who seemed to staple shots together until he got to musical scenes, when he suddenly came to a semblance of life, and with George Brent as her romantic lead acting with even less charisma than usual, it’s a mess. 5/8 of it is barely watchable. But it’s worth it to see 1) the range of Ginger Rogers’s acting and what the studios required of it, 2) how the studios still didn’t know in 1935 what Ginger Rogers could do, and 3) to see her short, lovely solo dance routines. The movie’s play is painfully slow and clunky, and seems intent on bringing the “Ginger Rogers — independent woman” persona down a peg. You keep asking the gods: where is the song and dance you promised me? The two musical numbers come in the last 20 minutes, and they’re pips. Two songs, by Jerome Kern-Dorothy Fields-Jimmy McHugh, wonderfully clever; the dance routines choreographed by Hermes Pan, Astaire’s longtime collaborator. The first, “Got a New Lease on Life,” is clearly an attempt to showcase Rogers as a solo dancer (which she was before her partnership with Astaire) with some of the panache of an Astaire solo, but it’s infuriatingly short. The finale, “Out of Sight, Out of Mind,” is a tight-budget stab at a showstopper. But it’s interesting to see Ginger try get out on her own as a singer-dancer between Top Hat and Follow the Fleet. That it’s so confined and confining in gender terms says a lot about who RKO thought Ginger Rogers was.
