Shall We Dance (1937)

Directed by Mark Sandrich. Starring Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Edward Everett Horton, Jerome Cowan, Eric Blore, Ketti Gallian, William Brisbane.

Minor Fred & Ginger toe-tapper offers many of the same pleasures that audiences had come to expect from their collaborations, but when it comes to entertainment value, only a few dazzling dance numbers can be described as anything better than “fleeting.” Slapdash farcical plot requires the stars to deny interest in each other, pretend to be married, deny being married, actually get married, plan a quickie divorce, hesitate to divorce, and so on. He’s an American ballet dancer faking an accent when it suits him (and doing a lot more tap dancing than ballet moves), she’s an actual tap dancer fending off dance partners/would-be suitors. A dance number in roller-skates and the “Slap That Bass” number in an oceanliner’s engine room are a lot of good fun, but the storytelling is too strained, and aside from a couple of suggestive double entendres that squeaked past the censors, too few of the jokes land (Blore’s “spelling bee” phone bit is almost inspired, at least). George and Ira Gershwin tunes include American songbook standards “They Can’t Take That Away from Me,” “They All Laughed,” and “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off.” Director of photography Joseph F. Biroc replaced David Abel mid-production but only the latter was credited.

68/100