Top Hat (1935)

Like many of their pictures, Top Hat opens with Fred making a bad first impression on Ginger, then spending much of the film trying to get on her good side. This device seems to fit Astaire’s insouciant, sometimes annoying screen persona, though he’s more sympathetic and likable here than in some pictures. Their early scenes, especially the sequence in the rain at the park band shell, are appropriately light and charming, with Ginger especially believable as the young woman annoyed but not entirely displeased by Fred’s attentions.

Then the plot takes a turn for farce with a contrived case of mistaken identity, as Ginger confuses Fred with her best friend’s husband. Suitably outraged, Ginger turns to her friend, who affects cynical unconcern to Ginger — though showing a different face to her bewildered, not entirely innocent husband.

Perhaps the most unusual element in the film is the unusual "gangster tap" finale to the big "Top Hat" production number, in which Fred wields a cane like a machine gun, with sharp raps of his heels for gunfire, and drops a line of tuxedoed dancers one by one. The gangster conceit may be part of the Depression milieu; certainly the film, with its glamorous, elegant trappings, is typically escapist Depression-era fare, laced with a hint of satire. In any case, whenever Fred and Ginger are in motion, the magic is timeless.