BEFORE: Now I've come to the end of Phase 2 of Fred Astaire's movies - Phase 1 ended last year right after St. Patrick's Day with "Funny Face", and with 14 films in 2017 and now another 5, I've just about seen it all. Umm, except for "Ghost Story" and "Holiday Inn", which I'll try to get to in Phase 3.
Tomorrow, February 17, on TCM's "31 Days of Oscar", they're finally reaching the acting categories, with the nominees and winners for Best Supporting Actress. Here's the line-up:
6:00 am "I Remember Mama" (1948) - Barbara Bel Geddes
8:30 am "All This, and Heaven Too" (1940) - Barbara O'Neil
11:00 am "A Patch of Blue" (1965) - Shelley Winters, winner
1:00 pm "Cactus Flower" (1969) - Goldie Hawn, winner
3:00 pm "Sayonara" (1957) - Miyoshi Umeki, winner
5:45 pm "East of Eden" (1955) - Jo Van Fleet, winner
8:00 pm "For Whom the Bell Tolls" (1943) - Katina Paxinou, winner
11:00 pm "A Passage to India" (1984) - Peggy Ashcroft, winner
2:00 am "Bonnie and Clyde" (1967) - Estelle Parsons, winner
4:00 am "Shampoo" (1975) - Lee Grant, winner
I think I'll start doing better, now that we're into the acting categories. I've seen 6 of these: "Cactus Flower", "East of Eden", "For Whom the Bell Tolls", "A Passage to India", "Bonnie and Clyde" and "Shampoo". So another 6 out of 10 brings my total up to 69 out of 187. Back up to 36.8%
THE PLOT: Tom and Ellen Bowen are a brother and sister dance act whose agent books them in London for the same period as the Royal Wedding. Each develops a British love interest.
AFTER: Wow, what a way to go out, with Astaire's famous "dancing on the ceiling" routine, which probably blew a lot of people's minds back in 1951. And the walls, I think he doesn't get enough credit for dancing on the walls, which is also no easy feet, unless you've got a special effects team that can create a rotating room. Any magic trick seems impossible until you know how it's done, and since earlier in the film there was a lot of tilting camera work as Tom and Ellen danced on the cruise ship. I would have predicted that they used the same low-rent trick they did on the first "Star Trek" series, with every actor just leaning one way, then the other when the ship was attacked, except that we see fruit bouncing across the tilted floor, and then a couch that moves in the direction of the lean. So the simplest explanation is that they built a giant room that could be tilted hydraulically in one direction, even though that's not exactly how ocean liners lean. (I've been on a cruise ship during rough seas, it doesn't just lean to one side and stay there, it's more of a back-and-forth...)
It's still an amazing achievement, when you figure that somebody had to build a room that looked like a hotel room, but with all the furniture bolted down, and unable to move an inch. Then of course, the camera had to be bolted to the floor so that it would rotate with the room, and give a constant view from one angle, even though it was rotating. Simple to conceive, really, but I bet there was nothing simple about the execution. They didn't just cut to him on the wall, because that wouldn't give the same effect. But there's definitely a sort of "pause" in the action, when Fred is sort of deciding between the wall and the ceiling, for example, and that's obviously when the room is being rotated - but they did their best to make it as seamless as possible, and he even goes around the horn twice for good measure.
Astaire also dances with a hatrack as a partner earlier in the film - this is also aboard the ship going from New York to London, and here the seas appear to be much calmer, the "ship" isn't leaning to one side. (Why, it's almost as if they weren't on a real ship, go figure...) But I'm assuming that hatrack had to be custom-made and perfectly balanced for him to manipulate it like that, roll it around, kick it over and then kick it back upright. This takes place in the ship's gym, (because don't all cruise ships have gymnasiums?) and then he dances with some parallel bars and a pommel horse, so we get a glimpse of what the Olympics might look like if they let professional dancers compete in the gymnastics section to musical numbers.
Oh, yeah, the story - apparently this was set during the wedding of Princess (later Queen) Elizabeth, although that happened in 1947 and this film came out four years later. Tom Bowen and his sister, Ellen, have a dance act, and are asked to come over for some kind of command performance, or maybe it's just that their agent wants to do a tie-in show? This is a little unclear. But at least there are no love triangles, and no chance of the dance partners falling in love with each other, this brother-sister thing ends up making a much simpler story.
Or does it? The course of true love never did run smooth, and there are still bumps on the road to love for both of them. Ellen's the kind of girl who'll juggle two or three boyfriends at once, never getting serious about any of them, and on the ship she meets her male counterpart, who also happens to be a British Lord, and also happens to be headed back home for the wedding. Tom starts a relationship with one of the showgirls (who he happens to meet accidentally on the street first) but she's in love with a man in Chicago who she hasn't seen in two years.
Keenan Wynn gets to play two roles, as their agent in New York and his twin brother in London, and Astaire's romantic partner is played by the daughter of Winston Churchill. Lots of good trivia bits surrounding this film. Partially based on real-life events, too, since Fred Astaire danced for many years with his own sister, Adele, who left the act to marry a British Lord. And apparently they once danced together on a ship, which inspired the "Open Your Eyes" number.
Also starring Jane Powell, Peter Lawford (also carrying over from "Easter Parade"), Sarah Churchill, Keenan Wynn (last seen in "Nashville"), Albert Sharpe, Viola Roache, John R. Reilly
RATING: 6 out of 10 Union Jack flags
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