Top Hat movie review & film summary (1935)
The movie has three other dance numbers, two solos by Astaire that are wonderful but not transcendent, and a final duet with Rogers ("The Piccolino"), where one of Irving Berlin's lesser songs is redeemed by the sight of Astaire and Rogers dancing all over a huge set that is intended to represent a canal-side hotel in Venice and looks every bit as realistic as the Grand Canal Shoppes at the Venetian in Las Vegas.
The movie's plot depends on a misunderstanding that is all but impossible: Ginger falls in love with Fred, then mistakenly decides he is the cheating husband of her best friend, Madge. "How is it that Ginger has never met her best friend's husband?" Alan Vanneman reasonably asks in the Bright Lights Film Journal. "Well, Europe is a big place."
Yes, and Madge and her husband, Horace, spend long periods living separate lives of luxury. That Horace is a womanizer seems, strangely, to cheer Madge, perhaps because none of the sex in this movie seems to require body parts. That's why she gives her blessing to what Ginger thinks is adultery. She even pushes the couple onto the dance floor for the "Cheek to Cheek" number.
This is an Idiot Plot, yes, and could be cleared up at any moment by one line of sensible dialogue, but there are times when nothing but an Idiot Plot will do, and we are happy to play along. The movie, made during the Depression in 1935, features characters so rich that even their butlers are gentlemen of leisure. Astaire plays Jerry Travers, who is opening in a London musical being produced by his best friend, Horace Hardwick (Edward Everett Horton), which means he doesn't know his best friend's wife, either.
For reasons utterly contrived, Jerry is staying in Horace's hotel suite, which is why Dale Tremont (Rogers) finds Astaire when she rings Horace's doorbell. As the film opens, Horace advises Jerry on the pleasures of marriage, and Astaire insists on the joys of bachelorhood with "No Strings," a Berlin song with lyrics that could have been written by the naughty Cole Porter:
Bring on the big attraction
My decks are cleared for action
I'm fancy free and free for anything fancy.
His tap-dancing during this number disturbs Dale, who is sleeping directly below them in a bedroom that looks like where Botticelli's Venus spends her nights when the clamshell gets damp. She comes upstairs to complain, he falls in love, and the next day buys out the hotel flower shop to fill her room. "I wonder what Mr. Beddini is going to say about this," the shop owner muses to an unbilled Lucille Ball. "The desk clerk has intimated that Mr. Beddini provides Miss Tremont with all the niceties, including her clothes. And her niceties are very nice."
