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  • Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression
  • Mitchell Breitwieser (bio)
Morris Dickstein , Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression (New York: W.W. Norton, 2009), 598 pp.

"My, she was yar . . . It means, uh . . . easy to handle, quick to the helm, fast, right. Everything a boat should be, until she develops dry rot."

—Tracy Lord (Katherine Hepburn), in The Philadelphia Story.

Here's Morris Dickstein's Fred Astaire: "Astaire's is a dancer's choreography, always respectful of the whole body in motion . . . the lean, light-footed whimsical figure of Fred Astaire, who embodied the grace and filigree of the era . . . a dream of motion that appealed to people whose lives felt pinched, anxious, graceless and static." He never stumbles, unless it's part of the act: "In 'Pick Yourself Up,' to win Ginger's attention, but also to drive her a little bit crazy, Fred pretends to have an ordinary, falling-down body, just like the rest of us." For Dickstein, Astaire exemplified what most people could only dream about during the Thirties, pure gracefulness, gravity its eager accomplice in a world without crashes. It's otherwise with Hildy Johnson, as James Harvey describes her, she did a better job of showing how things were ordinarily, for everyone else, including for most of the other artists sketched in Dickstein's broad panorama of those times:

[In His Girl Friday (1940), Hildy Johnson's (Rosalind Russell)] gracelessness—that touch of awkwardness, the suggestion of being too tall—never affects her self-assurance, even seems to enhance [End Page 290] it. When she gets excited she flaps her hands from her wrists—or she looks for her watch on the wrong wrist and to hell with it. She dodges through street traffic with her skirt hoisted up and her knees together like someone wading through a stream. When she wants to stop a man running down the street, she tackles him and sends them both sprawling. It's not grace she aspires to but composure. And when she achieves it—as she often does in these games—she seems transported by it, turning well-being into a peak experience. She lights a cigarette and lords it over the smoke: head tilted back, looking down along her face as she towers above the smoke, her I-don't-know-how-I-got-here-but-I-love-it look. But she is also at such altitudes dangerously exposed; and when she is rocked by something it's like a seismic shock, the head unmoored, tilted even farther back, the eyes jolted open, the half-smile gone. Never mind: towering is really her specialty—and casting sardonic glances, with half-closed eyes, on the world below. Her other specialty is the low crouching run, maniacal and banjo-eyed, slapping the brim of her hat back like a comic-strip character, usually cradling something in her arms, like a typewriter or a suitcase, as she scuttles between desks. Russell is like Groucho and Margaret Dumont, zany and dowager, alternating in the same person. Composed and then discomposed: towering and collapsing and then towering again.

Hildy is no Fred Astaire, but then again she's no Dick Diver either, no enervated impresario without the legs for tricks that had once seemed effortless:

As the boat gathered motion, Dick rested for a moment, belly-down on the board. Then he got beneath the man and took the rope, and his muscles flexed as he tried to rise . . . He could not rise. Nicole saw him shift his position and strain upward again but at the instant when the weight of his partner was full upon his shoulders he became immovable. He tried again—lifting an inch, two inches—Nicole felt the sweat glands of her forehead open as she strained with him—then he was simply holding his ground, then he collapsed back down on his knees with a smack, and they went over, Dick's head barely missing a kick of the board.

Diver, as Dickstein writes, borrowing a once-familiar term from Fitzgerald's description of his father, lacks "get-up-and-go," as opposed to...

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