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Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, Hollywood's premiere dance team, were usually dressed to the nines and gliding through elaborately exaggerated Art Deco sets in the 1930's. However, they go a bit more downscale for this 1936 outing, the fifth of their ten musicals together. This time, Astaire foregoes his top hat, white tie and tails to become a bubblegum-chewing sailor named "Bake" Baker; and Rogers plays dance hall entertainer Sherry Martin, who was Bake's partner - dancing and otherwise - before he enlisted. Consequently, unlike the mistaken identity ploys and romantic hesitancies prevalent in most of their previous pairings, they are already a couple from the film's outset.
Directed by Mark Sandrich (who guided five of their pairings), the film bears a narrative similarity to 1935's "Roberta" in which they are but one of two couples featured in the storyline. In fact, Randolph Scott plays the other male lead in both films, this time as Bake's womanizing crewmate, "Bilge" Smith. He is partnered with not Irene Dunne (who understandably turned down this follow-up) but Harriet Hilliard. Just married to Ozzie Nelson in real life and decades before Ozzie & Harriet, Hilliard plays Sherry's spinsterish sister Connie who falls hard for Bilge. In the silly plot, she is given a makeover by a young, bleached blonde Lucille Ball, and there is s classic three-way shot of Hilliard, Ball and a kewpie-doll adorable Betty Grable in front of a mirror.
Speaking of the story, what there is of one is credited to Allan Scott and Dwight Taylor and goes something like this...Bake and Bilge are on shore leave in San Francisco where they end up in a dance hall with their rowdy shipmates. Bake finds Sherry working there, while Bilge runs into Connie first when she comes in as a dowdy spinster and then showing up as a glamour girl. Romance blooms for both couples. Connie and Sherry inherit a steamer from their father, but they need money to keep it afloat. Multiple misunderstandings occur in both relationships, but it all works out when they turn the steamer into a theater and put on a fundraising musical revue. It's about as silly as it sounds, but it does provide a good excuse for some memorable Irving Berlin tunes and a trio of Astaire-Rogers dances.
The first two are casual in tone - a dance contest set to the percolating "Let Yourself Go" where they show off mercilessly to win and a physical shipboard comedy routine set to the toe-tapping "I'm Putting All My Eggs in One Basket". However, their last dance is a classic return to formality with a melodramatic piece beautifully set to a stunning arrangement of "Let's Face the Music and Dance". Intriguingly, this movie contains not only an Astaire dance solo but the only time Rogers ever had a dance solo to herself in one of their movies, an energetic tap routine again set to "Let Yourself Go". Dressed in a creamy satin sailor outfit, she also sings the same song most winningly near the beginning of the film.
Acting-wise, Astaire and Rogers are in typically zesty comic form here. While Scott plays his role with his trademark cock-eyed virility, Hilliard is an extremely dull presence, and as a former band singer, she performs two Berlin love songs in a frustratingly diffident manner. Regardless, the magic generated by Astaire and Rogers in their prime make this essential viewing. The 2005 DVD has several good extras beginning with a thirteen-minute featurette, "Follow the Fleet: The Origins of Those Dancing Feet," about how Astaire and Rogers started to work together. There is also a live-action "soundie" called "Melody Master: Jimmie Lunceford and his Dance Orchestra", a poultry-themed cartoon called "Let It Be Me," and the original theatrical trailer.


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