The Gay Divorcee was the first true Astaire-Rogers film. Impressed by the way they had stolen the show in Flying Down to Rio the year before, RKO Studios hired them to be marquee stars. They also hired Mark Sandrich, who had directed the dance sequences of Rio, to helm the pictures. Folks differ in their opinions of Sandrich’s work. For me, the five Astaire-Rogers films directed by Sandrich are among the best they made.
The Gay Divorcee was adapted from a Broadway play that starred Astaire in his last stage appearance, and featured songs by Cole Porter. While much of the cast was hired to do the film, inexplicably only one Porter song was retained: “Night and Day.” Many viewers consider the dance numbers among the best in the Astaire-Rogers body of work, but few think of the play itself as anything special. The plot is so similar to the much more highly regarded Top Hat, made a couple of years later (and written by the same screenwriter, Dwight Taylor), that a lot of scholars treat Top Hat as a “correction” of The Gay Divorcee, a more successful do-over.
There’s a lot of clunky stuff in The Gay Divorcee. Sandrich was basically just starting out as a feature director. Before it, he had directed only a couple of madcap farces by the comedy team Wheeler and Woolsey. Astaire was a big dancing star, but with little experience in the movie studio. Rogers had done a lot of work in supporting roles, and she had recent memorable appearances in two Busby Berkeley classics, 42nd Street and Golddiggers of 1933, but she was not yet considered star material. The movie’s plot is a fey Britishy upper-crust farce, with butlers and dizzy aunts and gigantic white penthouse apartments. It’s also loopy. Rogers’s Mimi, an elegant, dazzling woman of fashion, but an American (and so, inevitably, more down to earth than the limey snobs), wants a divorce from her geology prof husband, who, she informs us, is boring and inattentive. He’s off stage for most of the film. Mimi’s incompetent lawyer (played by the ubiquitous Edward Everett Horton) concocts a plan: they’ll arrange for Mimi to be found in her hotel room in the arms of a hired lover, a professional “co-respondent” who makes his living pretending to be women’s lovers and thus facilitating their divorces. So the plot depends on one of the oldest comic frames, at least as old as Aristophanes: someone comes up with a terrible plan, and everybody goes along with it.
In the meantime, Mimi encounters a professional American hoofer, Guy Holton (Astaire). Right away, we can detect that there’s a greater comic intelligence at work in the film than at first one might think. The cute meet unfolds when Mimi’s dress has been trapped when her absent-minded Aunt Hortense (Alice Brady) accidentally closes a steamer trunk on it.
Mimi is immobilized, and she’s showing a lot of leg that she can’t cover. Guy happens to be walking by; he dallies a bit, flirting with her helplessness; and in a gallant but inept attempt to save the imprisoned dame, he rips her dress (prefiguring a similar scene in Bringing Up Baby four years later). Complications ensue. The formal comic problem is almost abstract: Mimi has been immobilized physically, which matches her immobility in her marriage, her class, and her erotic life. The comic salvation comes from physical, corporeal freedom — she “becomes-dance” with Guy, eventually partnering in the joyous collective spectacle of “The Continental” in the finale.
Mimi at first resists Guy until she is seduced into dancing with him as he sings “Night and Day.” The dance is one of the most famous that the couple ever filmed, remarkable considering how early it comes among their films. It’s also the most erotic dance they will ever make together.
Meanwhile, the film is splitting into two distinct spheres: one a silly urbane farce based on language goofs, double-entendres, mistaken identities, snob baiting, and funny taunts at the Hays Code. (The professional “co-respondent” Tonetti [Erik Rhodes] we expect to be a suave gigolo; instead, he’s a loving husband and father — unaware that he’s also a cuckold at home –, and an ethical businessman.) The other sphere is a magical, kinetic formal enterprise, with carefully designed geometrical sets and dances that evoke Busby Berkeley more than the later Astaire-Rogers.
In fact, the magic world of The Gay Divorcee is rigorously designed. The magical energies of the liberating dance are contained in a recurring design pattern that we might as well call a mandala, punctuated by a dynamic interflow of black and white. (The central mandala is a dominant visual theme in The Gay Divorcee, but it also appears as the focal point in the ensemble finales of Flying Down to Rio and Top Hat. Its significance wanes as the films’ finales cease to be collective dances.) Once we notice this, the film becomes even more interesting, in the way dance, music, art direction, and costumes seem to tell a very different story from the silly farce. We can observe the magic mandala in which vital energies unfold growing and developing before our eyes.
The humor and storylines will improve in the later films, but already we can see the revolutionary aesthetic impact of the Astaire-Rogers dances. As the film develops, the dances include more and more elements of American dance: starting with buck-and-wing and ragtime tap in Astaire’s first solo, then jazz tap, then a dazzling hybrid of foxtrot, Latin, and modern smooth in “Night and Day,” concluding with a spectacular amalgam in the finale that even includes clogging. The choreographies — devised by Astaire and his long-time artistic partner, Hermes Pan — showcase a range of American dance styles assimilating a range of melting-pot influences: European, Latin, Anglo-Celtic, and African-American. Running parallel — or rather eclipsing — the tame, lame Euro-farce story is the spectacle of American multicultural artistic — corporeal — consolidation that was to be the main drive of the best American film comedies to come out of Hollywood in the 1930s and early ’40s.
One notable aspect of Sandrich’s direction in The Gay Divorcee is the way the cinematography of “The Continental” bears the marks of Busby Berkeley’s cinema aesthetic, as opposed to Astaire’s. While Astaire and Rogers are shown for the most part in full body shots, these are often from an overhead crane, rather than full on. More striking is the way the ensemble shots are highly varied, framing the dancers from diverse angles — canted, profiles, full on, close ups of dancing legs (one of Astaire’s betes noirs), etc. Astaire did not yet have the power to insist on uninterrupted full body shots. The diverse, Russian and German inspired “camera dancing” would soon disappear from Astaire films.
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