United States

By the time Shall We Dance went into production in 1937 Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers had already made six films together and where unmistakably one of the biggest things in Hollywood. Shall We Dance was the most elaborate and expensive yet of their films, it had more plot, and it had a score by the Gershwins so rich that it could afford to throw away Beginner's Luck and underplay They Can't Take That Away From Me and still have They All Laughed, Let's Call The Whole Thing Off, Shall We Dance and Slap That Bass to be going on with. It cast Fred Astaire as an American Ballet dancer with a Russian-stage name who is strangely attracted to American popular music and the curious dances that go with it. Especially since these are personified in Ginger Rogers, playing a popular and successful dancer in the other mode who is constantly, owing to an intricate series of misunderstandings, assumed to be married to Fred. This suits him well enough, but when the question of whether they are married or not threatens to wreck both their careers they decide - logically enough in this topsy-turvy world - that the only way they can sort things out is to get married just in order to get divorced. The ins and outs of the plot are very amusing, particularly when they involve Edward Everett Horton as the scatter-brained ballet impresario and Eric Blore as the officious floor manager. But finally they are there, as they should be, mainly as cues for long song and dance. And the music numbers are classic: whether it is Fred, dancing with the machines in the ship's engine-room at the beginning, or Ginger giving Fred a lesson in tap, or Ginger and Fred on roller skates in Central Park, this is the world of top hat, white tie and tails at its most enchantingly escapist.