Shall We Dance has been my favorite Astaire-Rogers film for a long time. That said, it has most of the flaws of the earlier films — a dull plot, uninspired camera work, bad jokes, bad pacing, and interminable mugging from Edward Everett Horton and Eric Blore. Except for the dances, it feels tired. And the dances aren’t among the best, either. The formula has run out of interesting tweaks, the big white spaces feel empty, there’s not much gaiety. On the other hand, Shall We Dance has beauties that the other films don’t have. The fine Gershwin score and tunes, for one — or two. In this post I want to focus mainly on one big beauty. The film has an idea that runs through it that grounds the dance routines and ties them together and also leaks into the plot. Film historians generally consider the Astaire-Rogers comedies to be breakthroughs in depicting gender parity as The Fred and The Ginger mediate their friction through their dances — displaying a partnership of equals in their virtuoso melding, their frequent side-by-side performances, and their joy in shared creativity. The dance historians emphasize how Astaire’s eclectic dance-style mediates among many ethnic traditions brought into the American melting pot — his synthesis of Irish clogs and jigs, British hornpipe, African-American tap, lindy and foxtrot styles, European ballroom and ballet, among others. Others point to the mediation of class oppositions, between elite and popular culture — a mediation especially pronounced in Shall We Dance.
In the film, the clashing class positions are represented by ballet (elite taste) and “rhythm” (popular styles based on Black dance styles). If that were all there is to it, the film doesn’t do a particularly effective job. But that isn’t all there is to it. Astaire’s Pete Peters (aka “The Great Petrov”) is actually caught in the middle of two distinct cultural clashes: between ballet and swing on the one hand, and between free-form dance and machinery on the other. The first appears to be a matter of class and taste. The second, by contrast, is between two kinds of modernity. The Pete/Petrov split shows the ballet/swing dilemma inside Pete himself. I don’t think the film does a very good job of managing that conflict. Ballet isn’t treated very well, and its partisans are mainly fools. Besides, Petrov isn’t shown dancing unadulterated ballet until the finale (and it’s pretty adulterated then, too). Its postures are usually quoted comically. The Pete/machine collision, however, is brilliantly done. So, more than the mediation of class differences, I see Shall We Dance as a sort of cinema-essay on modern art — American art — fending off two kinds of powerful cultural constraints of the Modern Age: the restrictive formalism of traditional art and the restrictive submission of the human body to mechanical mediation.
Shall We Dance is the first self-consciously modernist film that Astaire and Rogers made, the first in which dance engages the Machine Age head-on as a comic problem. There were lots of modernist elements in the earlier films but they were mainly decorative — art deco designs, au courant fashions, streamlined spaces. The plots, though, were as old as the Italian hills, and their formulas were repeated as if they were required by some archaic law. The Gay Divorcee (a film I’m also very fond of) is so mannered it could be turned into an opera buffa. Machines and mechanical production never interfere with our hoofers’ stories. The only decisive modernist element in the films was Astaire’s eclectic dance style, especially his foregrounding of tap, whose metallic clicks were inspired by the sounds of machines and were also intended to be heard over urban noise. By 1937, the year Shall We Dance was released, Busby Berkeley had made five monumental musicals that established the cinematic state-of-the-art of the machine aesthetic. Chaplin’s Modern Times had appeared in the previous year. The Astaire-Rogers concern was late to the game.
As innovative as Astaire was as a dancer, he was conservative as a film performer. His insistence that the dance scenes be filmed in full-body shots with minimal cutting meant that his films as wholes, not just the dances, concealed the role of mechanical reproduction in their own making. The focus was always intensely on individual human bodies — as the source of romance, art, virtuosity, and beauty. (The one exception was The Gay Divorcee, the first of the Astaire-Rogers features; director Mark Sandrich used flashy Berkelyoid angles and cuts for “The Carioca” group dance, a practice he didn’t repeat in the later films he directed.) In Shall We Dance machines become partners, complements, and blockers far more than humans do.
Pete Peters is pretending to be a Russian ballet star, “The Great Petrov,” a gender-and-star inversion of Ginger’s Lizzie Gatz/Countess Scharwenka in Roberta. (Both have great fun with their silly Eastern European accents.) Pete longs to combine “the technique of the ballet with the warmth and passion of this other mood.” The “other mood” doesn’t get named — all we learn is that it’s not “jazz” (which in the ’30s was associated with pre-swing 2/4 rhythm), it’s new stuff. Swing. Hot. Black.
The opening scene is well set up. Pete/Petrov’s impresario, Jeffrey (Horton), enters his company’s ballet studio as the Not-Busby Berkeley chorus of female dancers in tutus practices to piano accompaniment. Jeffrey then enters Petrov’s private practice room, where his star is laying down excited buck-and-wing moves to a phonograph record, taps attached to his ballet shoes. Jeffrey’s high-end tastes are outraged. Pete then displays how a balletic grand leap can be improved by combining it with shuffle steps. Even Jeffrey is momentarily delighted. We’re being promised a synthesis but so far the ballet side is represented by an idiot, and tap by a genius. It’s not quite fair that way. (This supposedly ideal synthesis was becoming a Hollywood goal in the late ’30s, as Balanchine had become a sensation when he moved to New York and choreographed Broadway musicals, and cultural commissars feared that popular dance was becoming too Black. It was part of Eleanor Powell’s brand, with her incessant twirls and high kicks.)
While we’re concentrating on that problem, the film deftly slips in a new one, a bigger one. Pete shows Jeffrey a flip book made of the popular dancer Linda Keene (Ginger Rogers), with whom Pete is smitten. The flip book is, of course, a little movie — like tap, it’s a prefiguration of a technology that will threaten the ballet’s traditional world just as the phonograph will. It’s a smart image of the mechanization of desire to come.
And behold, the flip book transforms into the very movie we’re watching. The representation becomes the reality. We enter Linda Keene’s performance (one of the very few times we see Ginger partner with someone other than Fred) and its aftermath. Unlike the always respectful Fred, her partner can’t control his desire after their Latinate tap routine, and has himself cooled down in the stage fountain.
Pete sets off to pay his amorous respects to Linda and overhears her arrogant, disdainful remarks when The Great Petrov is announced. Keene has never even heard of “the greatest star of the Russian ballet” in her pop-star ignorance, so he decides to make a grand entrance and turn the tables on her. I love this scene! Astaire has for once been given a really big comic moment. Astaire wasn’t personally fond of ballet, even though he respected it and learned from it. Dance teachers will tell you that ballet requires precisely the opposite bodily discipline than African-American dances do. So Astaire/Pete gets to demonstrate his skill at the old-world stuff while lampooning it mercilessly — the very image of Stan Laurel leaping about, clicking his heels, and greeting everyone with the nonsensically very Russian “ochichornia,” the title of a popular Russian tune played ad nauseam in Hollywood films to indicate Russianness. Unlike her doused partner in the flip book, The Great Petrov will have nothing to do Linda Keene and her incompetent “tweests.”
Pete can claim a mock victory over Linda but she’s still a problem. She’s a modern jazz tap diva in the style he himself desires, so his Great Petrov charade isn’t helping him. Soon he gets a taste of a new problem. In another funny scene, he tries to dance to phonograph records again. But now the record player, which was his servant in the opening scene (and his wonderful co-conspirator in The Gay Divorcee) now keeps running down. (Jeffrey has absconded with the crank-shaft of the old windup gramophone.) And he keeps running down and in circles with it. The scene is a fine example of Henri Bergson’s notion that mechanical behavior by living beings is inherently funny. Not only is Pete’s dancing bound to the gramophone, so is his whole jazzy style. So far. When the machine won’t work, neither will the dance.
Still, he gets his groove back in one of the greatest solo dance performances on film, Astaire’s ballet mécanique, The Boiler Room Dance. The machines in the ocean liner’s boiler room aren’t petty, undependable servants like the gramophone. They’re the big boys, much bigger than a slim little human like Astaire, one would think. The scene has been analyzed and deconstructed many times, in great detail. (The best account of it, imho, is Joel Dinerstein’s in Swinging the Machine.) I won’t address the obvious problems of appropriation posed by a scene in which African-Americans are depicted as ancillary to a white performer’s virtuosity obviously based on Black styles and models. I want to focus on the way Pete/Astaire becomes a partner with these great rhythm machines, and eventually asserts his human transcendence through his marvelous flexibility and improvisation. It’s an allegorical jazz performance, a jam session. Even if the Black musicians are sidelined, they are a sort of chorus that certifies that this is jazz, and jazz beats mechanical rhythms by incorporating them, bending them, and riffing on them. (Think of Duke Ellington’s incorporation of railroad train rhythms in his music.) Pete incorporates ballet moves, too, but Jeffrey would not approve, because ballet has become just another frame to be incorporated and liberated by jazz and tap.
Astaire seems to have more fun with his role than in the previous films. No longer the sincere, inventive juvenile suitor who keeps coming up with new tricks to get Ginger, Astaire finally gets a comic disguise in Petrov that he can actually play. With spirit! If Swing Time showcases Ginger’s best acting, it’s Shall We Dance that does that for Astaire. The film is emphatically Astaire’s. The aesthetic conflicts to be solved are all his. Rogers has relatively little stake in the film. In fact, Ginger, always skeptical about the sincerity of men, is downright waspish through much of the movie — she plays Linda brooding, sharp, and disdainful. A harder nut to crack than usual, with no female confidante to soften her. (But she does look gorgeous!)
Back to desire and the machine. The first Fred and Ginger partner dance doesn’t materialize until we’re almost an hour into the film. Linda thinks she’s escaped from Petrov and the rumors of their marriage, only to be tricked into dancing with him at a posh New York nightclub. Dancing to the Gershwins’ “They All Laughed,” Astaire’s Petrov gets into a challenge match with Linda — he’s faux ballet, she’s tap, until he breaks into tap himself and away they go. As in the Boiler Room Dance, Astaire transcends the normal divisions and gets the girl’s attention by modifying ballet moves into a taps-on-toeshoes synthesis. Well, not much of synthesis, since the ballet moves are all ultimately comic lampoons.
There doesn’t appear much of a machine theme until we look closely at Linda’s dress and listen to Ira Gershwin’s lyrics. I call this dress the Ginger Gears Dress.
At first glance the pattern appears to be big black sunflower-like blossoms on a white background. But a closer look reveals something more. These flowers resemble gears. Improbable as it may seem, Linda is linked to machinery. It’s easily missed but even the Gershwin lyrics she sings point in that improbable direction. They are mostly about great inventors of machines.
They all laughed at Christopher Columbus
When he said the world was round
They all laughed when Edison recorded sound
They all laughed at Wilbur and his brother
When they said that man could fly
They told Marconi wireless was a phony, it’s the same old cry
By the time Pete and Linda are reconciled enough to do the requisite exterior dance, the famous roller-skates routine, Pete shouldn’t have to prove his chops against machines, but there’s more work to be done. Skates may strike one as a rather primitive machine, but they’re machines anyway — and they pose a harder challenge than the gramophone. Skates don’t stop rolling unless someone stops them. I don’t think this routine is one of their best. They don’t handle the challenge of appearing off-balance while demonstrating mad physical skills very well, as say Chaplin did in “The Rink.”
It’s a rather timid routine. Its one nice comic virtue is that they keep skating closer and closer to the edge, until they finally fly over it. The machines win this one.
The grand finale continues the practice that began with Follow the Fleet, of bumping the big communal dance finales of the earlier films and substituting increasingly abstract, theatrical exhibitions. I’m not crazy about the Shall We Dance finale aesthetically, but it undoubtedly integrates more of the film’s themes than the other films’ finales usually do. Its strange construction and casting, its faint “surrealistic” quality (as more than one critic has tagged it), and the spectacle of Astaire pretending to be a ballet dancer, are far more motivated than one might think. In fact, it’s actually cerebral.
Pete designs his last Petrov performance around a lack. Linda has left the chaos of her relationship with Pete, ostensibly making good on her decision to leave the stage. Pete, now hired by Linda’s former manager as Petrov to provide the ballet part in a “Broadway and Ballet Merge” production, and willing to dance with no one but Linda, has his chorines wear identical Linda masks in the the final segments of the three-part spectacle. There’s a lot going on here. But first, the design of the whole scenario.
The finale is a mini-allegory of Pete’s personal drama of synchronizing ballet and jazz dance, and, through Pete’s story, an allegory for the creation of a new American dance form. It’s in three parts. In the first, Pete is solidly Petrov, a ballet dancer with a supposedly real ballerina partner (Heather Hoctor). The routine is supposed to represent modern American ballet — austere set, abstract gesturing within the tradition of balletic postures, a quasi-classical symphonic Gershwin score, and a symbolic narrative. I infer that Hoctor and her attendant ballerinas represent the “spirit of ballet”; Petrov represents balletic longing — serious business, big gestures, not having much fun. Missing something. As the Spirit leaves him, sashaying off the stage, Petrov expresses bereavement. Arlene Croce, author of The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers book, writes that director Mark Sandrich wanted the great Ballet Russe dancer and choreographer Léonide Messine to design the dance; when that didn’t pan out, he hired the future choreographer of Sonja Henie’s skating scenes in Thin Ice. The routine cleverly integrates some of Astaire and Rogers’s signature steps and alignments, but the poses and gestures forced on the dancers by balletic conventions rob them of their fun. I don’t know much about ballet but I’m pretty sure the posturing of this scene does little to argue for ballet’s elite qualities. It’s far too close to parody. If this is the thesis of a dialectical triad, it’s woefully weak. Why did the Spirit sashay away? Why is Petrov dancing with the Ballet Spirit to the music of “They Can’t That Away From Me,” the song he sang directly to Linda as they prepare to split up? If it’s directed to the Spirit, she’s the wrong addressee. If it’s to the absent Linda, she wouldn’t be in this world in the first place.
Here’s the whole of Part 1.
The meaning is pretty obvious but there’s no harm in breaking it down into its bits. The opening scene not only reminds us of classical ballet, it’s (intended to be) bona fide. The real thing. A traditional curtain raise reveals a chorus of ballerinas clustered in the spotlight. The accompanying music is Gershwin at his most impressionistic.
Into this scene enters the diva (Hoctor) from stage right: confident, potent, luminous. The tutelary spirit of the dance. She clearly commands the space.
Her power is underscored by Hoctor’s rather bizarre backbends. These were apparently Hoctor’s signature moves in other films. They aren’t orthodox ballet — they are intended to demonstrate that the Spirit has more strength than is required even for the classical form. Strength, maybe, but definitely not taste. (Croce says of Hoctor that she’s not a ballet dancer, she’s a contortionist.)
Petrov backs onto the stage from stage left , dressed in his cliche Russian tunic, just as the Spirit has turned her back on the chorines, who beckon Petrov to their dance. (A siren call?)
Fascinated, Petrov dances with the Spirit on the now empty stage, in full, serious pseudo-classical mode. Some of these moves recall some of Fred and Ginger’s couplings from earlier films — moves that Astaire may well have adopted from ballet in the past. But their stylization and formalism appears rigid rather than elegant.
Did the Spirit seduce Petrov into the dance? An enigma. The Spirit leaves stage right, leaving Petrov to make gestures of bereftitude. (Why did the Spirit leave? I don’t know. Are there any indications in the film that Pete/Petrov wants to abandon ballet? Any reason to think that he has lost balletic inspiration? Write your own answer. Maybe folks who are versed in classical ballet narratives know.) In any case, the segment’s main function is to signify “balletness.”
Then come the fireworks of Part II. Here’s the whole sequence:
The stage, emptied of ballerinas, is now filled with a mysterious chorus of women dressed in black and veiled by shadow, walk-dancing to a jazzed-up Gershwin score. It introduces the tune that caps the whole episode, “Shall We Dance.” Where the ballerinas were revealed by the traditional proscenium curtain opening, these women emerge from high modernist doors previously concealed in the big art deco flats. One of the dancers steps to the front, heading toward Petrov, who is as confused as Pierrot.
Fascinated, he leans in toward the lead dancer, as if to learn her steps. Not much mystery here — the chorines in black are the antithesis of the ballerinas in white. They’re not just opposites. The lead dancer (who will emerge for a moment as the main Linda surrogate) is not a tutelary spirit, she’s radically equal to the other chorines. They all share the same steps, and they all share the same face.
The lead dancer in the Ginger Mask eventually leaves stage left, symmetrically recapitulating the departure of the Ballet Spirit, leaving Petrov bereft again.
Petrov follows her off the stage. (For what it’s worth, he did not follow the Ballet Spirit.) While he’s gone, the masked chorines playfully allow a peek at their true faces, and behold! their true faces are almost identical Gingers, too.
Astaire reappears in signature tailcoat and carnation, the uniform he wore in the “They All Laughed” duet — and, of course, it’s the Astaire brand. He backs onto the stage, eventually to take his place at the head of the Ginger Mask Chorus.
The group then breaks into a group dance to Gershwin’s “Shall We Dance.” Now mainly Pete, with residual Petrov, Astaire breaks into tap flurries in between lagging quasi-balletic postures that become slides, a familiar Astaire step that’s exaggerated throughout the film. The balletic postures are just set-ups for jazz dancing.
But the ballerinas reappear with their tutelary Spirit, as if to re-seduce Pete, and to prevent him going over to the “dark” side. The Ginger Chorus leaves the stage, as if defeated in the battle for Pete/Petrov’s soul.
And the Spirit of Ballet celebrates her triumph, to the dramatic quasi-operatic orchestral accompaniment. She even reprises her contortionist exhibition.
Part III: The Synthesis.
Inexplicably, they rush off the stage tutti. Then the stormy romantic score turns to back to a swinging tempo of the title tune, and Astaire (now fully Pete — or is it “Astaire?”) strides in from the back at the head of the Ginger Chorus. He’s now fully integrated in the “new mood.”
Pete sings the song with full-throated ease, so fully possessed by the jazz that he affects vaudeville poses as classical as those of ballet. He finally breaks into dance, reprising the choreography he introduced in “They All Laughed”: balletic moves become poses, as if he were voguing on a disco dance floor, which are resolved by flurries of happy tap.
The chorines have withdrawn into the alcoves in the flats, arrayed as if they were mannequins in a shop windows, as if they were serially produced. The same dames. Astaire/Pete strides in front of them, selecting one or another, drawing them to the floor, and placing them in parodistic ballet poses that they keep as if playing a game of Statues. He makes the pseudo-display window mannequins affect postures that are equally artificial.
When he reaches the end of the line, the real Linda/Ginger makes herself known (using his original gag-greeting of their first encounter), and slips back into her alcove. A short teasing by all the Gingers follows as a Pete frantically tries to detect the real Linda among the fakes.
After he does, they perform an extremely short partner-dance that again recapitulates the moves of their first dance, but now using exaggerated quasi-balletic postures as pauses before jazzy tap flurries.
The finale concludes as the ballet chorus and the Ginger Chorus mesh in the background, the ballerinas affecting ballet steps, the Ginger chorus little quasi-taps, the Spirit of Ballet nowhere to be found. Instead of a new synthesis of high and low dance, jazz and tap have triumphed, transforming ballet into a set of vague gestures given new vitality as a bit player in the Big Show.
There’s nothing “surrealistic” about the Ginger Chorus. They knot together several of the film’s themes — or maybe we should call them “meta-themes.” For one, they evoke the Linda mannequin that Linda’s manager, Arthur Miller (Jerome Cowan), just happened earlier to have stored in his closet, available to create the photographic lie that Linda and Petrov are married. An Artificial Linda has already betrayed the real one, a silly version of the False Maria in Lang’s Metropolis.
The Ginger Chorus covers more territory than that, though. It is also a subtle (well, not very) homage to and satirical dig at the Busby Berkeley-style spectacle to which the Astaire-Rogers films were dialectically opposed. Not only do the women array themselves before the camera as if they were produced on an assembly line, Busby style; when they lift their masks for a moment, they remain almost identical. Blonde and Gingery.
The dig is specific. The spectacle of identical blonde beauties arrayed in varied patterns was one of Berkeley’s signature designs. Consider the show-stopper in Wonder Bar.
Or the carousel of white blondes in the “Young and Healthy” routine in 42nd Street.
That one also includes a moment that prefigures the punchline of Shall We Dance‘s finale: Dick Powell selects one superior blonde from the otherwise nearly-identical crowd of them.
Even more strikingly, the Girls in the Ginger Mask motif is an almost direct parody (if that’s the word) of the “I Only Have Eyes For You” spectacle from Berkeley’s Dames. In that one, our hero (played by Dick Powell) dreams that every face he sees is of his sweetheart (Ruby Keeler). At first it is just her face against a black background; then it multiplies into what appear to be Ruby-masks; and when the choral parade arrives, all the chorines are attired, coiffed, and made-up to be Ruby Keeler lookalikes.
Ultimately, the “real” Ruby is individuated, as the chorines fall out of the frame. In Dames, to be “real” is to be the model for repetition.
I haven’t seen any commentary on this striking resemblance, but I don’t believe for a moment it wasn’t intentional. So what’s the point? How do The Fred and The Ginger get out of the sticky situation of imitating Busby Berkeley’s machinic imagination? For one, Berkeley’s dream vision equates romance, imagination, and the art of movie-making. And that includes the technology of cinema, the dance of special effects of the desire-machine. There’s no lack here. Cinema supplies everything. Except maybe one thing: images of artists actively creating joyful art. Busby Berkeley is the demiurge behind it; Dick Powell does the invisible crooning. The characters in the dream move like somnabulists, humanoid mannequins, in the director’s dream. Including Ruby herself. No conflict, no friction.
Many critics think Shall We Dance shows how tired the Astaire-Rogers pairing had become; they often note that it was the first of their films that lost money at the box office. But to me, it represents the culmination of the partnership; it’s a swan song, a sort of summation. Fred and Ginger made a few movies together subsequently, but even Shall We Dance was a concession — it’s said that Astaire had already planned to move on from the yoke after Swing Time, but the lackluster response to that film spurred him to try one more film in the series. Rogers, too, was champing at the bit to play more dramatic roles and to compete for star status with the reigning comic stars who were her contemporaries. (After Swing Time, they both did films away from each other — Astaire in Damsel in Distress and Rogers’s in Stage Door. The box office losses of Shall We Dance — the first they experienced — led to one final film for RKO, Carefree, in ’38.) The interesting parts of the film are tightly focused on problems that Astaire is working out for himself as a dancer, performer, and film-maker. He takes on the problem of how the Machine Age can enhance modern dance, something that only peripherally involves a romantic partner. Romance is Old School. Ballet represents not a legitimate, potent tradition of formal culture. It’s a vitiating force that won’t allow joyful improvisation and the energies of marginalized folk. Astaire’s debonair style was always tied to the happy slumming of the high-class culture vultures of the late Twenties and early Thirties — the same impulse that led Vladimir Horowitz and Artur Rubinstein to hang out in Harlem to hear Art Tatum. Shall We Dance is an image of Astaire’s movement away from romantic dance and romantic nostalgia. In it, he takes on both what he conceives to be stodgy elitist formalism and the Busbyist absorption of dance-artists into mechanized dreams. Pete Peters picks Linda Keene out from among the mannequins to display the transcendence of improvisatory artists. It’s a transcendence that Linda/Ginger can facilitate, but more than in any of the other films, she’s just an accessory. Astaire will carry this “new mood” one step further in his next — solo — film, Damsel in Distress, in which dancing with objects and brilliant clowns (Burns and Allen) to a sweet Gershwin score opens completely new vistas for his art.
Bonus: A curious thing about Shall We Dance is that its most popular Gershwin tune, and the most often covered, “They Can’t Take That Away From Me,” is not danced; Pete sings it to Linda on a foggy, romantic ferry deck. No dancing, no Ginger joining in. I can understand why Ginger stays out of it; they aren’t her emotions (yet), and her character has kept her distance throughout. Still, it would have been a perfect song and perfect setting for a melancholic duet (Swing Time had one). I’m sure there was a reason for it, but I’m not sure it was good one. Apparently even Rogers thought so; at her instigation the pair reprised the song with a dance number in the last film they did together, The Barkleys of Broadway, made 12 years after Shall We Dance. (Scroll down for a video). I don’t care much for it, or the film. (I might like it better if I could see it in black&white. I’m allergic to Technicolor in general but having to see the greatest b&w team in musical comedy slathered in garish hues is beyond the pale.)
Bonus 2: I’m not a very sentimental guy. I like a bit of edge. My favorite rendition is by Zoot Sims with a killer backing combo.
Bonus 3: A superfine version of “They All Laughed” by Oscar Peterson.
