Music Makes Me: Fred Astaire and Jazz

Chapter 3: “I play with the very best bands”

99 backgrounds The New York Times reviewer for Broadway Melody of 1940 excused himself from the task of dealing with the plot. That wasn’t why he or Astaire’s audiences were there in the first place.“It is always the sincerest form of sabotage to analyze the plot of a musical production, and in this case it might be doing an active disfavor to the reader himself, if thereby he might be deprived of the sheer, unmental pleasure of following the intricate arabesques of sophisticated rhythm which the startling Astaire still manages to tap out with his not yet superannuated toes.”1 Few historians of the film musical have elected the “unmental pleasure” of focusing on musical numbers over the “sabotage” of analyzing plots. Integration has been the watchword, and analyzing the genre in narrative terms has dominated scholarship on musical film.2 And yet, with Astaire, different priorities prove more useful. As Jeanine Basinger wrote of Eleanor Powell , “Her movie career was mostly one long specialty number, with her plots and co-stars thrown in around her as an excuse for her dancing.”3 While this may overstate matters a bit in Astaire’s case—unlike Powell, he was a credible romantic lead—Basinger’s view of the balance between But when we come to the subject of music in the musicals, we come to the first consistent expression of popular songs and rhythm that this medium has seen, namely Fred Astaire. . . . whatever he may do in a picture he is in, has the beat, the swing, the debonair and damn-your-eyes violence of rhythm, all the gay contradiction and irresponsibility, of the best thing this country can contribute to musical history, which is the best American jazz. —Film critic Otis Ferguson (1935) “I play with the very best bands” chapter 3 100 | Astaire at the Studios plots and specialties is apt for Astaire. With Astaire as dance creator at the center of my story, I will not be cataloging plot types or considering how individual numbers forward the narrative. Rather, in this chapter— the first of three forming a triptych depicting production methods in the Hollywood studios—I survey Astaire’s films through the lens of what industry types called the background, the general setting of a film that plays host to the story, characters, and, most crucially, song-and-dance routines . Selecting the background was the job of producers, the men who decided what films would be made under the studio system. This chapter concerns the big decisions producers made: many reflect straightforward attempts to leverage popular music groups—dance bands—for the benefit of a given film product, and often Astaire’s tastes seem to be driving the choices. Chapter 4 travels to the writing department, where screenwriters grappled with Astaire’s musical proclivities. Chapter 5 journeys to the music department, where the arrangers who worked with Astaire receive indepth attention. All three chapters place specific creative types working beside Astaire in the Hollywood studio system in direct relation to the popular music industry, where jazz was a marketable style. Producers had real power in Hollywood. They made the key casting and story decisions, whether it was conceiving a film for Astaire or adjusting an existing script to his persona. Certain backgrounds allowed Astaire to move more freely, and the range of backgrounds within which he could comfortably dance was, unsurprisingly, somewhat limited . Astaire functioned best against a popular entertainment background . Quite often these backgrounds included jazz or dance bands and popular music contexts. Below I divide Astaire’s films into three more or less discrete categories based on their backgrounds. As will be evident, jazz-friendly contexts dominate. (The following discussion omits Astaire’s 1933 cameo debut as himself in Dancing Lady, the plotless revue film Ziegfeld Follies, and his post-1957 films.) Theatrical Backgrounds In nine films Astaire plays a musical comedy star in a vaudeville, Broadway , or West End background. In musical terms, these films usually echo the sound of Broadway shows, with the Hollywood studio orchestra deployed like a theater pit orchestra. • In You’ll Never Get Rich, Astaire portrays a Broadway dance director and performer. The film moves from a Broadway stage I play with the very best bands | 101 to a highly professional troop show, and both dress rehearsal and performance numbers are presented. • The Barkleys of Broadway, Royal Wedding, and The Band Wagon all center...