Follow the Fleet (1936); Shall We Dance (1937); The Barkleys of Broadway (1949) – DVDs

FOLLOW THE FLEET
**½/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras B+
starring Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Randolph Scott, Harriet Hilliard
screenplay by Dwight Taylor and Allan Scott, based on the play "Shore Leave" by Hubert Osborne
directed by Mark Sandrich

SHALL WE DANCE
***/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B+
starring Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Edward Everett Horton, Eric Blore
screenplay by Allan Scott and Ernest Pagano
directed by Mark Sandrich

THE BARKLEYS OF BROADWAY
**½/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras B+
starring Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Oscar Levant, Billie Burke
screenplay by Betty Comden and Adolph Green
directed by Charles Walters

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Every partnership has its ups and downs, as our soaring divorce rate will attest. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers were no different, and a selection of their B-list titles–one of which is widely considered the beginning of the end and another of which trades on memories rather than on the present–bears this out: Although Follow the Fleet, Shall We Dance, and The Barkleys of Broadway are far from quintessential, they have their quintessential moments and show the pair and their creative partners colouring outside the lines. One of these, the sometimes-maligned Shall We Dance, is actually very good, and the bumpy rides of the other two are occasionally enthralling.

Follow the Fleet is successful whenever it decides to be an Astaire-Rogers movie–that is, whenever it cuts to the main event of Fred as ex-hoofer/current sailor "Bake" Baker and his attempts to win back former partner Sherry Martin (Ginger). But their crackling lover's spats get sideswiped by the much soggier affair between Sherry's dowdy sister Connie (Harriet Hilliard) and Bake's man-of-the-world buddy, Bilge Smith (Randolph Scott). It's this aspect which has aroused the most critical wrath–Hilliard especially has come in for a personal drubbing, but the role is what it is: a distraction from the interplay of the marquee names, who ought to be owning the picture. Bette Davis herself couldn't do more with Connie.

The film is slightly difficult because the two stories are intertwined, with Bake and Sherry trying to give the sub-romantics a fair shake. Still, there's plenty here to satisfy even casual fans. Irving Berlin's gentle wit lifts the first song, a ditty where it's explained "We joined the navy so that we could see the world/but what did we see?/We saw the sea!" The other numbers don't quite rise to that level of cleverness, but the famously elegant final dance (with its near-lethal beaded dress) is well worth waiting for, and there are enough brilliant dirty tricks on the part of Fred and Ginger to distract from the useless Hilliard/Scott subplot.

Of course, Follow the Fleet lacks the Astaire-Rogers support element that remains the crucial distinction between good and great: Edward Everett Horton. He returns for Shall We Dance as typically uptight ballet impresario Jeffrey Baird, who's pushing Fred as a Russian ballet god when in actuality he's Peter P. Peters from Philadelphia, PA. Baird's plans for creditable art crumble once Pete falls for famed Broadway star Linda Keene (Ginger)–and it's here where Horton shows what the supporting cast is worth to the formula. Trapped on a cruise to New York, rumours get out that Pete and Linda are an item, which Horton snobbishly exacerbates; this allows Linda's publicists to balloon it further into secret marriage, causing more headaches for Horton (and the inevitable confrontation with hotel manager Eric Blore). And as various parties rapidly inflate the goings-on, their importance as the storm around the eye of the name players becomes apparent.

Shall We Dance is the one that everyone says heralded the demise of the legendary pair. To be sure, the production is more bloated and less elegant than the team's previous RKO efforts, yet Fred and Ginger writ large are better than not at all, and one is gratified to see the awareness of our heroes' importance. And just as sentimental Irving Berlin suited the tone of Follow the Fleet, snappy George and Ira Gershwin fit the snappy high spirits of Shall We Dance to a T. Though it's usually offensive to see mawkish Broadway buffs drool over standards, the Gershwins justify the slobber, seeing you with "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off" and raising with the immortal "They Can't Take That Away From Me." The latter song, brilliant for its weaving of cleverness and sincerity, sums up Fred and Ginger at their best–the ones who shoot off their clever mouths when they really mean to dance.

The Barkleys of Broadway doesn't really live up to the aforementioned films. For one thing, it was done 10 years after the Astaire-Rogers partnership dissolved; for another, it's MGM huge where the others are RKO spare. And though it trades on the reunion, the lighter-than-air attitude is gone, replaced by garish Technicolor and all the sound and fury the Freed Unit could muster. That being said, more than just the trappings are off: where the other films were dependent on Ginger getting pissed off and Fred winning her back, you wonder whether she should bother this time. The eponymous Barkleys are Broadway mainstays who have a spat when wife Dinah is wooed by a culture vulture (Oscar Levant) eager to turn her into a "great tragic actress." Husband Josh thinks she owes everything to him, and despite much flabby self-effacing, she sort of does owe everything to him–a cold slap in the face to poor Ginger Rogers.

Admittedly, the film manages to get back on its feet by the time Rogers makes like Sarah Bernhardt in her showstopper monologue. Too, there is the juicy vivacity of Freed Unit musicality, with its retina-searing colours and deliciously assaultive excess. Numbers include the famed "Shoes with Wings On" sequence, sort of a light-comic version of The Red Shoes, and a reprise of "You Can't Take That Away From Me" that manages to be moving in spite of the bull that surrounds it. The Barkleys of Broadway isn't an official part of Fred & Ginger's canon and is largely of interest to specialists, but the merely inquisitive shouldn't find it a complete waste of time.

THE DVDs
Warner's DVD release of Follow the Fleet looks okay. There's a slight dinginess to the full-frame image that betrays the film's age, as well as a tinge of indistinctness to the transfer itself; it gets by but it could have been sharper. The Dolby 1.0 mono track works no miracles on the vintage mix but sounds respectable. Extras begin with "Follow the Fleet: The Origins of Those Dancing Feet" (11 mins.), which deals with the numbers (with Fred adapting to the rougher naval milieu) and Irving Berlin's contributions, not to mention that heavy beaded dress that nearly brained poor Astaire. The interview subjects are a mishmash of participants, experts, and family members perhaps a little overblown in their praise, though they should at least provide a good intro for the uninitiated. Next comes the musical short Melody Master: Jimmie Lunceford and His Dance Orchestra (10 mins.), wherein a devil heralds the Harlem sounds of Lunceford, singer Myra Johnson, and dancers The Three Brown Jacks. Not terribly exciting as cinema, but as a record of a performance it's plenty entertaining. Finally, Let it Be Me (8 mins.) is a Friz Freleng cartoon in which a young chicken is swept off her feet only to be abandoned in the big city; it's a combination of humour and pathos that would be unthinkable nowadays.

While the full-frame presentation of Shall We Dance is a tad sharper and cleaner than its predecessor, it's not without grain issues; the centre-channel audio is up to the video's level: a little soft but sufficiently potent. Kicking off the supplementary material, a feature commentary by songwriter Hugh Martin and pianist Kevin Cole is mostly confined to gush about the film's wonderfulness and a little bit of trivia that won't satisfy very many people. Meanwhile, much of the same personnel from the Follow the Fleet doc resurfaces in "The Music of Shall We Dance" (11 mins.) to deal with the Gershwins' contribution to the film, in particular their standards "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off," "They All Laughed," and "They Can't Take That Away From Me." We learn that the Oscar nomination for the latter song proved a comfort for Ira in the wake of George's passing. In the meantime, Sheik to Sheik (21 mins.) concerns a Walter Mitty-type salesman falling into a sand trap and coming out in the middle of the desert, where he tries to sell to a Beau Geste-ish Foreign Legion outpost. It's a vanished sort of gentle comic fantasy that's pleasing to rediscover. Toy Town Parade (6 mins.) is another Freleng cartoon, this one about the archetypal child who's sent to bed before he's ready and watches similarly archetypal toys do magical things. It's of interest not for what it is but for the distance between its solid craft and the cheapjack ways it would be represented now.

The Barkleys of Broadway has its own unique set of issues: there's a lack of colour unity, with minor bleed-through apparent in the full-frame, '40s Technicolor image and some compression fragments in scenes of darkness. If none of this exactly detracts from the brilliant saturation, it's certainly a petty nuisance. The Dolby 1.0 mono sound is great, however, and surprisingly full-bodied. Elsewhere on the platter, "Re-United: Astaire and Rogers Together Again" (12 mins.) reunites the usual suspects to enthuse and reminisce about the production's salient points. Special care is taken to deal with the associative bells that would be rung for a contemporary audience of fans and the individual who came up with the falling shoes finale for the "Shoes with Wings On" number. Custom by now, it's a little too idolatrous but nonetheless interesting. Meanwhile, in Edward L. Cahn's Annie Was a Wonder (10 mins.), an offscreen narrator recalls the Swedish immigrant who was his childhood housekeeper; part of a reminiscence series, it's remarkably sensitive for its time (1948), right up until some forced rah-rah America sentiment bubbles up. Finally, Droopy Dog gets his day in 1949's Wags to Riches (7 mins.), a Tex Avery cartoon that finds faithful Spike trying to get his master's inheritance by offing the titular canine. It all goes wrong in physics-defying ways that are alone worth the price of the disc. Rounding things out: the trailer for The Barkleys of Broadway. The three DVDs reviewed herein are available individually or as part of Warner's five-disc "Astaire & Rogers Collection – Volume 1".

• Follow the Fleet
  110 minutes; NR; 1.33:1; English DD 1.0; CC; English, French, Spanish subtitles; DVD-9; Region One; Warner
• Shall We Dance
  109 minutes; NR; 1.33:1; English DD 1.0; CC; English, French, Spanish subtitles; DVD-9; Region One; Warner
• The Barkleys of Broadway
  109 minutes; NR; 1.33:1; English DD 1.0; CC; English, French, Spanish subtitles; DVD-9; Region One; Warner