Top Hat

Top Hat is the most brilliant of all the 1930s Astaire/Rogers musicals; its wonderful dance routines, catchy Irving Berlin songs, witty dialogue, lavish Art Deco sets, and outstanding performances by Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers have ensured its continuing popularity more than seventy years after its first screening in 1935, combining brilliance in performance, screenplay, music, photography and set design.

Peter Evans immensely readable volume uses this paradigmatic film to explore questions not only of integration across the Hollywood musical in general, but the ambiguities of (gendered) national identity, romance, subjectivity and the notion of the couple. Written in a clear, accessible style, Top Hat probes text and context carefully to appeal to the student and teacher of the musical and of Hollywood film history, as well as the film–loving general reader.

List of Figures vi

Synopsis vii

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 1

1. The Making of Top Hat 6

2. Fred Astaire: "Outlaw" Stylist of the Dance 19

3. Ginger Rogers: Confirming and Defying Convention 26

4. Introduction to Narrative and Number: The Bumpy Road to Love 35

5. The Numbers 43

6. Querying National and Sexual Identity 85

Conclusion: A Perfectly Swell Romance 101

Notes 104

Bibliography 106

Index 114

Peter William Evans is a Professor of Film Studies, in the Department of Film Studies at Queen Mary University of London. His publications range from classical Hollywood (books on the musical, romantic comedy and the Biblical epic, and articles on film noir, the western and Hitchcock), British cinema (a book on Carol Reed) and Spanish cinema (books on Buñuel, Almodovar and Bigas Luna).

"Its considerable claims to Art and its resonant magic are the dual focus of this insightful and highly readable study by Peter William Evans . . . Evans approaches this most celebratory of musical comedies in celebratory mode but also with a deserved seriousness devoid of solemnity." (Times Literary Supplement , 24 June 2011)