I had an deep affection for Follow the Fleet for many years, but it’s time for me to admit that it’s not very good. There’s no doubt that it’s an unusual and interesting film in the Astaire-Rogers canon but watching it soberly now, it seems uninspired, spliced together with carpet tacks, hastily made and under-rehearsed. Fred and Ginger’s dances are oddly graceless (excepting of course the showstopping “Face the Music and Dance” final routine — more about which later). The Irving Berlin songs are second-rate for him (with the same exception); Astaire delivers them in his standard way, but Rogers’s singing is disappointingly thin and reedy. The great supporting comic actors of their best films are nowhere to be seen. Randolph Scott’s character is oafish, and you could say much the same about his performance. The plot lines make no sense — why didn’t Sherry (Rogers) give Connie (Harriet Hilliard) a makeover long before she visits the club? how did Connie get the gig to sing in place of Sherry? Why does Connie decide to leave San Francisco for home, then change her mind and decide to stay, and then decide to leave again, all in three minutes? Why is there a pet monkey in the film at all? and of course, why does the proletarian crew of sailors and cabaret dancers put on a show about high-society Riviera angst, complete with gowns and tailcoats?
I like Sandrich’s direction of some other Astaire films — The Gay Divorcee, Shall We Dance, and Holiday Inn — but Follow the Fleet feels like a pedestrian B-feature made under a tight deadline. The pacing is awkward, with lots of missed timing and dead air. And despite the back projections of navy vessels at sea, the whole kaboodle feels more like a stage set than one of the Big White Rooms of the other films does. The dialogue lacks wit. The relationships seem off-kilter. Why does Bake (Astaire) believe Bilge (Scott) is an upright guy when he’s basically acted like an arrogant, sarcastic bully to him throughout? Why does Bilge forget all about Connie after he’s daydreamed so sincerely and romantically about being “the captain of her ship?” And most irritating of all, why does the film allow such bullshit sexism in the depiction of Connie in a Ginger Rogers film, the actor who most embodied the independence of professional women in contemporary Hollywood?
Like Roberta, another lame entry in the Astaire-Rogers canon, the studio, RKO, decided to make the principals secondary comic characters to a “higher” plotline involving supposedly more serious romantic characters. They are reduced to being the mediators for the “main” actors — the stiff Scott (also one of the perps of Roberta) and the oddly static Harriet Hilliard (who would later become the singer in Ozzie Nelson’s swing band, and the Harriet of Ozzy and Harriet fame). Hilliard actually does a nice acting job in the film but her role is disturbingly constrained and isolated from the rest of the film’s world. And that’s typical of the disjointedness of the film. Lots of different parts are thrown together without much care. The songs and dances, too — with the exception of Connie’s two melancholic ballads — are just revue routines that interrupt the action, the most notorious being the final spectacle of “Face the Music and Dance,” which is as distinct from the rest of the film as a music video. The more you think about it, the more it appears that the soul of the film is disjointed. An “integrated musical” it is not. (In his well-known article, “Fred Astaire and the Integrated Musical,” John Mueller does not mention a single dance from Follow the Fleet as an example.)
Within individual scenes the flow is also disrupted constantly by Bake’s arbitrary violation of rules. He forces Sherry to join a dance contest, even though as an employee she’s not allowed to, and he won’t leave the dance floor even after he’s been tagged. He screws up Sherry’s jobs, twice — with the owner of the Paradise, and her audition with Nolan. He doesn’t hear the bugle-announced Assembly because he’s into his jam session. He violates the shore-leave curfew. He basically crashes Iris Manning’s elegant party (not figuratively, but literally). Sherry has her transgressive moment (setting Bake up for a fight with a naval officer) but at least she’s getting her just revenge. The most important transgressor is of course Bilge, who breaks a promise to and faith with Connie. The goal of a comedy with so many fractures and unmotivated elements would normally be to resolve them at the end. And the final spectacle actually does tell a story about repair and recovery — but it has nothing to do with what has gone before. Bilge’s change of heart at the end might as well have been the result of Tinker Bell’s fairy dust.
That disjointedness could actually have been a theme. If there’s any thematic consistency in Follow the Fleet it’s in the constant disruption of flow. Events and scenes simply happen, one after another. There’s a year’s break in the storyline, when the fleet sails off on its “world tour.” Neither Bake nor Bilge are in contact with their gals for that time. And now there’s a monkey. Also striking is the sharp separation of working from upper class. In the best of the Astaire-Rogers films, the rich are both ridiculous and affable, and Astaire’s characters are especially adept at imitating and accessing them; as a performing artist, he’s a combination of a tricky servant and an innovator. He wears their clothes with the best of them. But in Fleet that’s impossible. He’s always in his infantilizing sailor suit.
And that sailor suit may have been the single concept behind Astaire’s dances, much as the tux and tails were for Top Hat. A conscious decision was probably made by Astaire, the studio, or both, to set Fleet in direct contrast to Top Hat. Instead of the elegant “fancy free for anything fan-cee” high-society milieu of the previous film, now there’s the working class world of sailors whose labor is bound by military obligation and discipline, suffering the boredom of having “nothing to see but the sea.” Instead of juveniles smoothly suaved up by the uniforms of adult evening wear, now it’s grown men turned into children by the uniforms worn by children. Naval films were not yet as popular as they soon would be. Military stories were primarily about the army, a residue of World War I, in which US naval forces had a minimal role. As the prospect of war intensified, sailors came to be depicted in a more heroic light. But Astaire’s peacetime navy is basically a job provider. Astaire’s sailor uniform isn’t a display of freely chosen patriotic virtue; he’s bound to it and by it. He can’t change it for civilian clothes, except when he’s performing “Face the Music” and transcends into dream time. Its incongruity with his off-ship surroundings makes him always slightly ridiculous.
Still, there’s reason to believe that Astaire welcomed this slumming for one good reason: the hornpipe. Fleet begins on the deck of a navy vessel with a chorus of sailors singing Berlin’s cute “We Saw the Sea” in an Americanized Gilbert and Sullivan style, punctuated by a few seconds of a Groucho-like hornpipe.
That little jig, and mention of the hornpipe in Berlin’s lyrics, introduces what might be considered a historical essay on the hornpipe as a core element of American dance, especially tap. The Anglo-Celtic sailor’s dance was assimilated to African-American clogging styles in many early iterations of minstrel tap and buck and wing, and Astaire was fond of making broad allusions to it, much more often than did, for example, his Black models, John Bubbles and Bill Robinson. In Follow the Fleet there are more of them than usual, to the point that all of the pre-finale dance routines are loving invocations of the hornpipe/minstrel/tap axis. And the ridiculous sailor suit offers an article of style impossible to use in more elegant milieux: bell-bottom trousers.
Before the examples, consider the hornpipe.
Clogging dances generally require seriously erect posture, as do most schools of tap. As jigs and hornpipes were assimilated with African styles like buck dancing, the characteristic minstrel fusion of buck and wing evolved that varied erect and flashy bendy postures. In Fleet, Astaire is arguably using the dancing sailor to bring hornpiping into the forefront in a typically synthetic Astaire way. It’s in the hornpipey jitterbug in Fred and Ginger’s lindy contest. (Note how important bell-bottoms are for these steps.)
And then there’s the particularly hornpipey jazzed up buck and wing on the ship’s deck. The mess-around with the male chorus of sailors is an obvious, and stylistically appropriate, parody/reprise of the “Top Hat, White Tie and Tails” spectacle of Top Hat. Here, the presence of the male chorus actually makes more sense than in the earlier film, since on-deck hornpipe ensemble performances were common, at least in the British navy.
Even in the great “All My Eggs in One Basket” comic duet, in which Ginger goes full-on Harpo, we see overtly hornpipe moments. Fwiw, this is my favorite dance in the film — I think it’s also an allusion to the hornpipe/buck and wing/minstrel axis. It’s introduced by an excellent “feelthy” ragtime by Astaire in a barrelhouse piano solo, and then evolves into a vaudeville routine that was probably hoary when Astaire was a boy. The historical essay again. And note that Astaire isn’t wearing bell bottoms here — the sailor suit lingers only in the now-jaunty hat — but Ginger is definitively wearing bells, subdued as they may be. Like her legendary gowns, the pants create traces of her movements broader than the steps themselves.
The film’s spirit of unmotivated non sequiturs reaches its climax in the elegant finale. To call it a climax is misleading, though, since it has nothing to do with any of the action that preceded it. In fact, it’s hard to imagine a conclusion to the main action of Follow the Fleet that would be less connected. The set is as abstract as the rest of the film’s are grittily specific. The scene of a high-end Casino where Fred and Ginger sport pretty well fixed up couture and yet are still on the brink of despair has no echo in the film’s story, where grunt digs are the norm and despair of any kind is unimaginable. As for the dance, it is one of the most balletic of the pair’s choreographies and, most unusually for Astaire at this point in his career, does not feature one second of tap, let alone hornpipe steps. The dance could easily have been made in the silent era. The percussive color of popular dance styles has been proscribed; what we see is the approach-and-retreat of 19th century ballet, and dancers gliding on air — an image of “high ballroom.” It is somebody’s dream. But certainly not Bake’s.
Follow the Fleet remains good fun for distracted minds — it seems to have been put together by just such minds.