The second of the Astaire-Rogers star vehicles, Roberta has its fans. I’m not one of them. Although, admittedly, many of its fans admire the duo’s dances as if the rest of the film did not exist. If those are the terms, then I’m on board, too. The film contains some memorable chemistry between Astaire and Rogers, while the ostensibly main plot, a love affair between an émigré Russian princess (Irene Dunne) and a hunk American hayseed (Randolph Scott) who inherits his aunt’s Parisian fashion empire, pretty much stinks. The film was directed by William Seiter, a solid RKO and Universal director, who had an extremely uneven output. Some of his films are basically hack jobs, while others, like The Moon is Our Home, are excellent. Why Seiter was chosen to direct Roberta over Mark Sandrich, who had done Flying Down to Rio’s dance showstopper “The Carioca” and Astaire’s and Rogers’s previous film, The Gay Divorcée, is unclear to me. Seiter had directed Rogers in three earlier non-Astaire films, and she apparently felt comfortable with him; it’s said she detested Sandrich. (Interesting, then, that Sandrich elicited such great work from her. She also liked working with George Stevens on Swing Time, a film I don’t rate as highly as many folks.)
The studio clearly decided that they would go back to the formula of Flying Down to Rio rather than The Gay Divorcee. Like Rio, there are two intersecting levels of plot: a high-class one involving Parisian haute couture, emigré Russian royalty, and quasi-operatic songs, and a “feelthy piano” one involving an American jazz band (“the Wabash Indianians” – how American can you get?), popular hoofing, and feckless hayseed nostalgia. Most of the Astaire-Rogers films play variations on this class & culture friction, in which the lead pair synthesize the two cultures to the benefit of everyone’s fancy freedom. But where the best of the A-R films satirize the upper crust by showing them as basically daffy and/or pompous, Roberta (like Rio) treats the uppers with sentimental admiration. Irene Dunne (who is given no space to show the comic chops she has in The Awful Truth, Theodora Goes Wild, and My Favorite Wife) gets to sing what the middlebrow audience would get to admire as “high culture” songs, in a lugubrious sentimental style that shuts all the comedy down flat. The Princess Anastasia craze that had taken Hollywood (the romantic belief that the Romanov Grand Duchess had escaped death by the Bolsheviks and was living secretly in exile, ready to take the throne when czardom would be restored) was apparently currency enough for RKO to model Dunne’s role on her. The romance between her character and Randolph Scott’s is a dreary anchor, and Seiter’s direction does nothing to perk it up.
Fred and Ginger, on the other hand, give a great performance. Rogers pretends to be an aristocratic Polish singer (the only way a crooner can make a living in Paris, she tells us). Rogers imitated the comic accent of Lyda Roberti, who had played the role on Broadway (she can be seen in Million Dollar Legs, if you can get a hold of it). She is, of course, an impostor; like Astaire’s character, she is from Indiana; they were neighbors and childhood sweethearts. Their routines together are exceptionally good. The progression of the dances follows the pattern of the first three films. Astaire opens with a very broad American style (buck and wing in The Gay Divorcée, a vaudeville romp in Roberta – later a hybrid tap in Top Hat), then a great comic duet complete with a bit of vaudeville dueling to the Kern-Harbach & Fields song, “Hard to Handle.” This is one of my favorite Astaire-Rogers dances. It’s a hybrid ragtime-lindy and it’s said it was filmed after one take. It’s the first time you can feel pure unstudied joy in their pairing. You can see it in their eye contact and you can even hear squeals of pleasure toward the end.
This is followed by another classic song, “I won’t dance,” which leads into an Astaire solo, prefaced by Astaire playing “feelthy” boogie woogie piano (as he will again in Follow the Fleet), demonstrating why his friend George Gershwin felt Astaire could have been a professional jazz pianist. By this point there has been a division of labor: Astaire has done most of the dancing, and Rogers has done most of the singing and comic acting.
The famed “Smoke gets in Your Eyes” routine follows, much too artificial for my taste – it is the first obvious “exhibition dance” in their careers, and has precious little to do with the story. Integrated, it is not. It completely eschews the African-American and Anglo-Celtic elements that gave such roots diversity to Astaire’s choreographies. But it’s all redeemed in the short finale.
The finale is the first time we see Astaire and Rogers not clinching at all – the reel and tap are back, they are two full frontal hoofers in sync, with no pretexts of seduction or sexual play. They are childhood partners again. The tune is “I won’t dance” reprised, but now done as a full jazz orchestral number, arranged by the great Max Steiner and similarly great house arrangers at RKO, and played by RKO’s stellar house orchestra. (Someone really needs to write about the role that Steiner’s crew and orchestra played in creating Hollywood masterpieces.)
