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This madcap musical from 1935 about an American dance star visiting London swirls effortlessly back into cinemas, with classic songs from Irving BerlinLike a Shakespearian marriage comedy with a spoonful of Feydeau farce, this madcap musical from 1935, from screenwriters Allan Scott and Dwight Taylor and director Mark Sandrich, saunters back for a re-release. It features Fred Astaire as Jerry, the American dance star visiting London, a city seen in almost surreally weird back projections – and Astaire incidentally does an intentionally terrible Cockney accent when he pretends to be a hansom cab driver. (It is one of the rare times he does not appear in faultless evening dress.) Irving Berlin’s classic songs Cheek to Cheek and Top Hat, White Tie and Tails are great, and Astaire swirls on a forward-tilting gyroscopic axis with his spindly arms and legs effortlessly orbiting him like Saturn’s moons.Playing opposite him – and of course, as she herself pointed out, doing the same thing as Astaire only backwards and in heels – is Ginger Rogers; she is Dale Tremont, a freethinkingly modern young American woman who has a romantic escapade with Jerry, but gets upset when she thinks he is the husband of her pal Madge (Helen Broderick). In a tizzy of emotional hurt Dale flees to Venice where she impulsively decides to marry her highly-strung Italian couturier Alberto Beddini (Erik Rhodes). Meanwhile Madge’s actual husband, theatre impresario Horace Hardwick (Edward Everett Horton), brings Jerry over to the Venice Lido: a quite extraordinarily camp flooded stage set of canals and bridges, like something from Las Vegas. Eric Blore gives us some very broad comedy as Bates, Horace’s grumpy manservant and master of disguise. Continue reading...