La Reina and I watched Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers in The Gay Divorcee last night, and when we woke up this morning, we both had "The Continental," the big, final musical number from the film, stuck in our heads. Alas, YouTube doesn't have any clips from The Gay Divorcee, so one has to suffer through one of cinema's most famous dance sequences: Irving Berlin's "Cheek to Cheek," from Top Hat. The last 3 minutes of this are simply amazing and beautiful. And, IMHO, it's still not even Fred & Ginger at their best.
Saturday, October 07, 2006
Not Quite the Song Stuck in My Head When I Woke Up This Morning
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3 comments:
Smooth as silk, smooth as silk...
Actually, I alway preferred Gene Kelly over Astaire because of his sheer athleticism, but as far as class and elegance go, you can't beat these two.
What was the movie where Astaire and Rogers did the dance sequence on ice skates?
It's Shall We Dance (1937), and they're on roller skates, singing and dancing to the great Gershwin classic, "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off."
Fred was actually quite an athlete, playing a lot of tennis and golf, even into his 80s, but Gene was definitely the more muscular of the two, both in physique and style. They both amaze me, though, for how incredibly well they could still dance when they were older. Astaire was 57 when he made Silk Stockings, and still so smooth and graceful, dancing with the much youinger Cyd Charise. Kelly was 55 when he did his last movie musical, Les Demoiselles de Rochefort. Both of those, btw, are excellent and underrated films.
You guys have great taste in movies. My favorite of that genre is Holiday Inn with Bing Crosby, Fred Astaire, and Irving Berlin music. I still sing the songs from it to Kermit :-)
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