Swing Time

Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire were at the height of their career as a dancing team in this mellifluously charming but somewhat overlong Depression era musical romance about a luckless gambler (Astaire) and the dance instructor (Rogers) with whom he falls in love.

There's some tip-top Jerome Kern-Dorothy Fields songs that are well integrated with the story-line, Astaire does his one and only screen appearance in blackface in 'Bojangles of Harlem', a tribute to legendary tap dancer, Bill Robinson, which has an eye-catching sequence with Fred dancing against a background of three backlit silhouette. The dancing is superb but there is however less of the tap-style and more of an expressive or representational approach to dance in numbers such as the classic 'Never Gonna Dance' in which the pair act out the ups and downs of their fine romance.

 

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