Film Review: Top Hat (1935)
One of the most important ingredients for successful Hollywood musical is music, but composers are seldom credited for their success. Irving Berlin whose long and prolific career resulted in some of the most popular pop standards of the first half of 20th Century, represents notable exception. His work on Top Hat, 1935 film directed by Mark Sandrich, resulted in one of the most popular musical comedies and arguably the most successful among all collaborations between Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.
Script by Allan Scott and Dwight Taylor is loosely based on A Scandal in Budapest, 1911 play by Alexander Farago and Aladar Laszlo. The plot begins in London where American dancer Jerry Travers (played by Astaire) came to debut in show produced by his English friend Horace Hardwick (played by Edward Everett Horton). Horace invites Jerry to his hotel room, which is one floor above the room occupied by Dale Tremont (played by Ginger Rogers), American model working for pompous Italian fashion designer Alberto Beddini (played by Eric Rhodes). Jerry gets caught in the moment and begins tap dancing, waking up Dale who comes up to complain. She is met by Jerry who immediately falls in love with her and later seduces her. But, problems arise when Dale mistakes Jerry for Horace, who also happens to be husband of Dale’s best friend Madge (played by Helen Broderick). This lead to a chain of misunderstandings that would be ultimately resolved when everyone gets together in Venice.
Some of the contemporary critics complained that Top Hat looks too similar to The Gay Divorcee, another musical comedy starring Astaire and Rogers, which had been released a year earlier. There are some valid arguments for those who experienced little bit deja vu – both films have paper-thin plot based on simple comedy of errors and share much of the cast, which involves many supporting players like Edward Everett Horton, Erik Rhodes, who plays even the more over-the-top character than he has played in The Gay Divorcee and Eric . What makes this film much different is music. Irving Berlin provided the film not with one great musical numbers, but with five – “No Strings (I’m Fancy Free)”, “Isn’t This a Lovely Day”, “Cheek to Cheek” (that would become one of the most recognisable piece of 1930s pop music), “Top Hat, White Tie and Tails” and self-referential “Il Piccolino” which closes the film. Each of those compositions is used in very different song and dance numbers, many of them perfectly choreographed by Astaire himself.
What is even better is that Berlin’s music works is in almost perfect balance with romance and comedy. Astaire and Rogers again show incredible chemistry together, despite plenty of apocryphal stories that they actually didn’t stand each other in real life. They poured their life and soul in the film and worked very hard, with Rogers later describing how her shoes were full of blood after each day of shooting due to need to rehearse complicated routines and scenes sometimes depicted with a single take. And the result of this hard work is more than evident on the screen. Top Hat, due to suffocating MPAA Production Code, lacked the flair of Flying Down to Rio, but it compensated it with much more polished direction by Mark Sandrich and significantly larger budget, which is quite evident at the screen, especially near the ending when audience can see fantasy version of Venetian Lido reconstructed as one of the most elaborate and spectacular studio sets of Classic Hollywood. And almost everything in the film seems big, including hotel rooms, while protagonists, belonging to the upper class, don’t seem to have a single care in the world. The only reminder of still ongoing Great Depression is a single dialogue line in which Dale mentions “living on the dole” in her native country. The rest of the film represents near perfect example of escapist entertainment, which allowed impoverished 1930s masses window to a magical world and helped them forget their real life troubles for a while. Top Hat and films like these served that purpose then and they can serve that purpose even now, while even the real life viewers that share material status of film’s protagonists might appreciate its aesthetic quality and irresistible charm.
RATING: 8/10 (+++)
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