Saturday, November 17, 2018

Who performed Irving Berlin 's "Let's Face the Music and Dance" better?









In case above link breaks:












In case the above link breaks:





















Rest of the dance :
















Larry Billman [ Billman, Larry. Fred Astaire: A Bio-Bibliography. Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1997. Print.] : All of the wonderful, sophisticated leering and mentions of Gertrude Stein and things, they don't happen in [the film] "Follow the Fleet" because it's more of an everyday person's movie.  I think that's where it loses its  comedic power.















John Mueller [ Mueller, John E. Astaire Dancing: The Musical Films. Columbus, OH: Educational Publisher, 2010. Print.  ] : The comedy is almost always entirely contributed by Astaire and Rogers. They do a good job of it but they could have used some help.
















Rick Jewell   [ Jewell, Richard B, and Vernon Harbin. The RKO (radio Keith-Orpheum) Story. London: Octopus Books, 1983. Print.  ]:  The beaded dress in "Let's Face the Music and Dance" according to Ginger...I wonder about this...but according to Ginger the dress weighed about 35 pounds.































Ava Astaire McKenzie [Fred Astaire's daughter]: Ginger's sleeves on the dress were so heavily beaded I would have thought she couldn't have even lifted her arms. But the first take that beaded sleeve hit Daddy right in the face and he actually saw stars.

















Mueller: They finished the dance, nonetheless, though Astaire says he couldn't remember what it was.  And then later they did several other takes  but when they went back, they found the first take was the best, so that's the one that's on the film today.

















Billman: You can see him kind of do that [jerks his head back] and go on and when he talked about it later he said he didn't know where that came from.  He thought somebody came in and punched him with boxing gloves on.  He didn't see that one coming. But I have to defend her on that one. It was the weight of those beads that makes the dress move the way that it does.

Mueller: That's a very unusual dance in that that's the only one in all the Astaire / Rogers movies of the 1930s in which they step out of character.  It's a really major masterpiece.  But it's unlike their other duets. It's something you could pull out of the film and you wouldn't notice it was missing.

















Billman: It is a dance/drama onto itself.  It has a beginning - middle - and an end and it tells a very different, kind of disturbing story.















Astaire [ singing]:
There may be trouble ahead,
But while there's music and moonlight,
And love and romance,
Let's face the music and dance

Billman: We use dance as a metaphor for so many things that we feel and it is actually is Astaire and Rogers "Let's Face the Music and Dance" has come into our vernacular not only as a song title, as a dance number from a film, but it means something.  It really does mean something.  So I'm particularly fond of that number. I find it beautiful.  I really do.











Posted by adagioforstrings at 4:03:00 PM
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