It spanned sixteen years, two studios, and now, ten DVDS (eleven if you count the included documentary.) It's the exalted partnership of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, which started in the early thirties with Flying Down To Rio and ended in the late forties with The Barkleys of Broadway.
Cocoon yourself over the Christmas holidays and watch them all, with Astaire and Rogers: The Complete Film Collection, a handsome, high-end box set just out for the yuletide.
Take it from a dyed-in-the-wool - er, make that "dyed-in-the-silk" - Fred and Ginger fan: the ones you'll return to over and over are the middle entries of the catalogue, the films produced at the height of the 1930s, specifically, Top Hat, Swing Time, and Shall We Dance?. Rio, Roberta and The Gay Divorcee are interesting only as early run-ups to the perfect formula. Starting with Hat, the genre solidifies, and soon spins out into some of the most charming work ever produced in the Studio Era. Each entry is a winning mix of romantic mix ups, comic sidekicks, showy art direction, the music of the day's greatest composers, and of course, plenty of dance.
Put any of the Big Three in your DVD player, and from whatever comparatively maudlin place you are, you'll be instantly included into world of roomy art deco apartments where folks lounge in tuxedoes, riding outfits and silk pajamas and whisk off in private planes to attend carnivals. As the line from the Irving Berlin song goes, "An atmosphere that simply reeks with class."
Verbal sparks will begin to fly between Fred and Ginger, and you will be made to realize that even without dancing, these two go together like air and earth, that his coy remove is the perfect counterpart to her all-American pluck. Further, you'll note that each gives just the right measure of emphasis to the repartee, their tongues, in imitation of their feet, aware at all times of the ultimate sin of treading too heavily.
Then, of course, Fred will take Ginger's hand, some Berlin or Kern will play, and the greatest synchronicity of all will occur: the dance numbers, presented, more often than not, without cuts. It's impossible to eschew cliché here: Astaire and Rogers dance as one. It's the same lightness of touch, the same fun-loving showmanship, the same disciplined abandon.
The pairing continued beyond these films, of course, but as you'll witness by wading to the shallow end of this collection, that when Fred and Ginger move out of the boudoirs and parlors of the '30s and into dressing rooms and Broadway stages of the '40s, charm gets lost in scope. Worse, it's Fred's individual numbers, like the magical shoe store piece in The Barkleys of Broadway, that become the highlights, not his numbers with Ginger.
Think of this 11 disc set, then, as an éclair: rich, sweet and classy - but the best part by far is the middle.
