Top Hat is considered by many to be the best of the Astaire-Rogers films, and for many others it’s second only to Swing Time. I don’t feel that way. I’m not crazy about it and I like it less and less with each viewing. I know that’s very much a minority opinion but it’s my blog and I’m sticking to it.
There are lots of things I do like about it. Eric Rhodes as Beddini is wonderful (though I prefer his predecessor, Tonetti, in the The Gay Divorcee). Helen Broderick as Madge steals the show. The Irving Berlin songs are good (with the exception of the dismal “Piccolini”). It’s a pretty good Max Steiner score. Astaire is relaxed and funny, and Rogers is great with a very poor script. David Abel’s cinematography is erratic but has some fine scenes. The dance routines are very fine — though to my mind they are oddly abstract and artificial compared with the dances of the earlier films.
Top Hat is often thought to be a “correction” of the first full Astaire-Rogers partnership, The Gay Divorcee, from the year before. The stories and structures are so similar it’s easy to think that. (Astaire thought so, too, and he wasn’t happy about it.) Personally, I like the earlier film better, even if it’s clunky (though not any clunkier than its “correction”). It’s fresh and loopy, and its design elements are artful. For me, Top Hat is, by comparison, arch and affected and without commitment to its artificiality. Practically everything in Top Hat is over the top, but instead of delighting in all the excess, the film keeps subverting it, as if none of it was really thought-through and sufficiently rehearsed. While Lubitsch and Paramount were making films that James Harvey calls knowing comedies, and Busby Berkeley and Warner Brothers were making comedies full of grit and intensity, the gags and jokes in Top Hat seem like the opposite, as if they’re being tried out for the first time or pulled out of a bag of old music hall routines. (It’s pretty stunning that the same Hungarian boulevard playwright, Aladár László, wrote the plays on which both Trouble in Paradise and Top Hat were based. Think of the possibilities: Fred and Ginger in Trouble and Lubitsch directing Top Hat. ) Consider the roles of Eric Blore and Edward Everett Horton, doomed from the get-go by moronic dialogue in the script, undisciplined in performance, and then smothered by humor-murdering mugging, bad timing, and bad cutting. They were much funnier and on task in The Gay Divorcee. Their material was better, too. Structurally, the action limps from tableau to tableau; some scenes, like Dale’s attempt to persuade Jerry that they had a liaison in the past, are just mindless — they could have been deleted without anyone noticing; the secret story of Horace’s petite fille in Paris appears as improvised filler; and with the exception of Madge, none of the characters has (as Da Mayor says in Do the Right Thing) the sense of a billy-goat.
The film is a monumental case of missed opportunities and unexploited possibilities. I can easily imagine Top Hat as a subversive comedy about gender masquerade and mistaken identities. It is the only Astaire-Rogers film named after a fetish. Their other films are full of comic fetishes but Top Hat is the only one in which the characters veritably inhabit them. It’s the campiest film in their catalogue. The material is right there in the foreground. Ridiculous incongruities abound — lame vaudeville schticks delivered by men in elegant evening wear, a ridiculous mistaken identity (that Jerry is Horace) perpetuated for the length of the film when it could have dispelled at any point, shaggy-dog scenes, and the gorgeous sets and dances broken up by idiotic repartee and ham-handed timing. The famous gay double-entendres and sissy characters are so exaggerated they become doubly camp — parodies of parodies. Genders are almost ritually marked by clothes — the “top hat, white [and black] tie and tails” for the men, and the ornate rococo flounce of Beddini’s gowns for Dale’s ultra-woman. So many squandered resources.
I have no problem with the camp. It’s one of Top Hat‘s redeeming qualities. Here’s how I see it: when a comic play or film can be performed equally well by cross-gendering the actors, or having all the distinct gender roles performed by actors of one gender, camp rises to the level of philosophical comedy. A lot of comedies can do that work — a good deal of Molière, for instance, given the already theatrical costumes and stylized gestures of the Versailles court. Several Shakespeare comedies, too, of course. I think Top Hat could be performed that way. Being a man in its world means wearing a specific uniform, whose inherent camp potential was well-known at the time. Consider the German cross-dressing classic Viktor und Viktoria of 1933.
And Jerry and Horace contemplating their “ménage.”
At the other end of the spectrum, with the exception of her mannish riding gear in the gazebo dance, Dale’s clothes are so extremely girlie that she seems in drag when she wears them, like a female-impersonator impersonator.
On a side-note, Dale’s and the men’s clothes are linked early on by the bow, a design motif that is traditionally linked to girls’ and women’s fashions but in Top Hat becomes an unmarked male sign. (In The Gay Divorcee, the parallel motif was the mandala, which operated almost fractally from the level of fashion accoutrements to architectural design. The bow doesn’t work so globally in Top Hat.) Almost every male character wears a bow tie — white or black — at some point in the story. Ironically, the straight necktie (a sign of informal wear) becomes the marked term, drawing attention to the fetish nature of men’s neckwear in general. The only exception to these protocols is the Venetian policeman, whose uniform and outsized mustache mark him as an outlier. He’s so masculine — as carabiniero and mustachioed superego — that he appears to have no gender overlap or ambiguity. In a nice move, the script makes him a code-trickster in another way — hiding that he speaks English until the right moment.
Dale’s gender progress is displayed in her clothes in a strikingly abstract way. Early on, before she succumbs to Jerry’s attractions, her clothes include exaggeratedly feminine, debutantish bow motifs (there’s even a hint of it in the odd collar of her otherwise manly riding habit).
These extremely feminine touches are design-motif-overlaps of the men’s white/black ties and Dale’s girlishness at this point. After all, she’s still a young “spinster,” as Madge puts it. (Astaire is said to have objected to the script in part because it made him seem like a juvenile; and from beginning to end the film can’t seem to make full adults out of Fred’s juvenile and Ginger’s deb.)
Once her heterosexual attractions kick in, the bow disappears — remaining exclusively with the men — and femininity appears in regalia, replete with flowers and ostrich feathers. As Dale becomes used to the idea of having an adulterous affair with a man she believes is the husband of her good friend, her habille jumps from girlish to “womanly,” with no steps in between.
And are finally resolved in a “sensible” dancer’s gown.
These uses of exaggerated gender signs are plausible, or at least acceptable — as they apparently are to many of the movie’s fans — in a romance of two innocents surrounded by clueless fuddy-duddies who suppress their sexuality, or alternatively, in an erotically sophisticated world where concealing one’s deviant proclivities is the norm. But that won’t work, since one of the supposed innocents, Dale, is Beddini’s kept influencer. If her reputation doesn’t bother her, it’s not because she’s clueless. Dale’s no deb.
Top Hat abstracts romance roles and mistaken identities until gender has no substance. The signifiers of romance are so artificial they become empty — and so, great possibilities are squandered. What if, like Bringing Up Baby, the film had let its suppressed polymorphous perversity play out, recognizing what the story is telling us but the performance disavows: that Horace is the male with the most jam (not only does he have his little Violette, his “ménage,” and a constantly roving eye, but even Madge wonders whether she hasn’t been underestimating him); that Madge is the most “game” girl (amused and interested in the Beddini/Horace relationship, with a new “interest” in Dale); that there is a “ménage” of Bates, Horace, and Jerry at the beginning, and a potential one of Beddini, Horace,and Madge at the end; that there are advantages for Dale in marrying Beddini. Much of the camp quality of Top Hat comes from these repressed suggestions. A braver, or simply more confident, film about gender artifice could have been made from the material, and even passed the Hays Code.
Ah! but the dances! The dance routines are very fine taken in isolation. At the beginning, Jerry’s joyous “affliction” of uncontrollable dancing even promises to have a role in the plot design. The viewer is introduced to the story in a very funny and cleverly conceived set of scene contrasts and fetish-wear. The graphic top hat of the opening shot morphs into a real top hat in an almost Busbyean homage-parody — so that movie, male evening wear, and the symbol of male dominance fit into each other like nested dolls. The hats are phallic containers for a set of male elders as they enter the “Thackeray Club” — an arch allusion to Vanity Fair, dusty literature, and old-school Victorian codes. The Club — like the Totten Library in Hawks’s Ball of Fire— is basically a tomb. Silence is the rule, the peace must not be disturbed. Jerry, “the well-known American gentleman,” is fundamentally out of place as he waits for his impresario, Horace, and being “American” he can’t resist making noise with his hoofs before he departs — a sonic punchline.
The scene segues to Astaire’s great “Fancy Free” solo, as he feels the irrepressible joy of becoming-dance, a brilliant combo tap emphasized by the incongruity between his exhibitionist gestures and the sleek restraint of his tux. That should be the through-line of the whole film. But it isn’t. The routine is an abstract elaboration of the “Needle in a Haystack” dance of The Gay Divorcee, in which Astaire dances into his on-the-town costume with the help of a capable butler. I think the “Fancy Free” scene is really well conceived and directed, with a few abstract props and subtle camera moves, all to show that Jerry’s staid evening wear — same as the vestments of the Thackeray Club elders — is no obstacle to his “American” exuberance. In fact, such dancing might be the best use for it. The clever tilt to Dale’s room immediately below is a very cool riff on farce’s classic game with rooms. Dale is prevented from slumber by Jerry’s noise. He’s literally bringing down the roof. The silence/noise = suppression/exuberance theme continues. Dale is on the side of the Thackeray elders. She has called the managers, and steams upstairs to put a stop to the fun. In her ridiculous satin dressing gown, complete with a big bow and a soupcon of the ostrich feathers to come, she’s an unlikely killjoy.
But that’s what she is. Jerry, smitten, tries out some lame flirtations, but she’s a tough little spinster, with superego on the mind:
"You probably should have a couple of guards." "I'll call the house detective and tell him to put his arms around you."
All of which leads to Astaire’s sand dance — Jerry acting as the Sandman — a really lovely resolution to the silence/noise friction that has been the running theme since the opening shots. Too bad it never surfaces again.
The lead-in to the gazebo dance is a whole other matter. The concept might have looked good on paper, but its follow-through is half-baked. It’s a meeting of two “hoofers” — literally (get it?). Dale is an experienced horsewoman. She has the habille to prove it. Jerry, by contrast, has trouble with his cab-horse, and his outfit is a parody of his evening wear. Surprisingly, Dale, who can handle a horse, is afraid of thunder — something Jerry tries to use to his advantage in a cute, silly come-on. Is Dale metaphorically wary of Jerry’s “thunder?” (Astaire embodied lots of things but thunder ain’t one of them.) The famous duet that follows is the film’s music-hallish dance duel that became an integral piece in the Astaire-Rogers formula. It was prefigured by the great “Hard to Handle” routine of Roberta and was expanded into two full routines in their next film, Follow the Fleet. In those two films the comic dance competitions are rationalized by making the characters professional dancers and erstwhile partners who presumably are already quite familiar with each other’s moves. The gazebo dance apparently required no motivation. Though there’s no prefigurative hint that Dale knows how to dance, she has little trouble matching Jerry’s steps. Top Hat‘s new atmosphere of romantic fantasy allows even the clown dance to be an intuitive courtship. Jerry’s dance power is so strong that it transforms Dale into a worthy partner, while still allowing her to keep some of her pride. It’s a great routine but it’s also the last time we see Dale do any joyful clowning until the finale. In a sense, the dance is less about the diegetic Jerry and Dale than it is part of the meta-diegetic Fred and Ginger. For the first time, their dance “moment” (Astaire’s own phrase) flips the script and becomes the purpose of the film, rather than a part of the narrative. It’s a tableau in its own space — Fred without his male fetish accoutrements (even the parody cape and top hat of a London hansom-cabbie have been discarded), which Ginger appropriates with her derby hat, jodhpurs, and riding crop. He’ll never be so casually “American” in the film again, and she’ll never be so unfeminine.
This leaning toward abstraction — of both Fred and Ginger as meta-diegetic presences and a music video-like tableau — becomes a full lean-in in Jerry’s “Top Hat, White Tie and Tails” stage routine. It’s motivated (barely), since Jerry was first introduced by Horace as the star of his production. Justifiably one of Astaire’s greatest routines, it’s also one of the most abstract in his Ginger-era films. That goes for the deco set, the choreography of his solo, and the symbolic drama of the tails-and-white-tie shooting gallery. I’ve read several interpretations of the routine’s ending, ranging from the simple Astaire-asserts-alpha-male-dancer-dominance to Jerry asserting his individuality among the mass of identically uniformed men to an assertion of the American artist’s appropriation and transcendence of Euro-snobbery. None of these make sense to me but that’s not a problem. Jerry has whatever it takes to transform yet another male fetish object, a cane, into one expression of phallic power after another: the cane of the hobbling elders becomes a versatile magic wand, a “third leg” in his tap, and then a gun for shooting down rivals (I assume) and eventually the elders of the Thackeray Club themselves.
“Cheek to Cheek” is the routine that clinches the love relationship of Jerry and Dale, filling the same niche as “Night and Day” did in The Gay Divorcee. There are enough similarities to justify some commentators’ calling Top Hat the earlier film’s “remake.” All this is deliberate in many ways — cashing in on a successful formula, but also to establish important differences, some subtle, some not. Ginger is presented as being much older than the one year difference between the films. She’s no longer a rail thin debutante with long hair and bare shoulders being romanced by a considerably older man. Now she’s presented as closer to Fred in age and a woman of the world — a mistress of fashion. (It’s tough to recall that the deb in The Gay Divorcee is actually married, and consequently much closer to being an adulteress than Dale.) The main consequences of her greater “maturity,” though, are that she’s a more accomplished dancer (both diegetically and meta-diegetically), less sexy, and wears more fabric. And feathers. The two dances differ also — and perhaps most significantly — in that “Night and Day” operates like a courtship dance, again both diegetically and meta-diegetically, in a theatrical dance tradition; “Cheek to Cheek” is much more abstract and artificial — it is “symbolic” in a different tradition: exhibition dance. It symbolizes dance itself more than it does seduction.
Now we’re getting into the weeds of taste. For me, the artifice of “Cheek to Cheek” is borderline kitsch. Much has been written about how much side-by-side dancing predominates in the Astaire-Rogers choreographies, an arrangement that emphasizes their equality as partners. It also emphasizes that their dancing is not primarily about how one partner leads and the other follows; the equality is “pre-erotic,” closer to childhood play than seduction. It works especially well with ludic dances, the lindies and clown duets, but even in “Night and Day” there’s an equivalent separation of partners. In “Cheek to Cheek” the side-by-sides are extremely artificial and gestural. The main feature of the dance is the number of Dale’s backbends and lifted twirls (moves that maybe the younger Ginger could not have done so well). In any case, these are moves that emphasize something that earlier dances did not: Jerry’s stability and Dale’s pliancy. All those bends and twirls are often interpreted as signs that Dale has yielded to the ecstasy of her love for Jerry. Maybe. Given her wildly flouncy feathered gown next to Jerry’s tailcoat, however, Dale has become a diva. Her moves are exaggerated compared to Jerry’s, her submission to desire nearly hysterical. She’s become the embodied fetish of the yielding feminine. For what it’s worth, that stops as soon as the dance is over. End of tableau.
The film’s finale is the woeful “Piccolini” ensemble dance, the second, and last, attempt at RKO to imitate the success of “The Carioca” finale of Flying Down to Rio. Despite its Italian name and Vegas-Venetian setting, it’s based on Latin American rhythms. It’s the last festive collective dance we’ll see in an Astaire-Rogers film. Kitschy and empty as it is, it still celebrates dancing as a social activity. It’s an afterthought, though. From this point on, dance is for couples only.