Swing Time (1936)

It is a performances centric movie

Amateur movie with Big budget

It is interesting even when nothing much happens, which is for most of its 3-hour running time. Read full review

One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.

I never know quite how to respond to these movies. They have so many plot similarities. Fred is in trouble in some way, and Ginger is distant and resistant (ooh, a rhyme). Of course, they are fabulous dance musicals and the dancing is what the whole thing is about. It's my understanding that Astaire was about as demanding in this one as he could be. The plot involves a gambler who has a group of really conniving friends who get in his way as he tries to marry a society woman. Her father has had it with his wastefulness and lack of dependability and demands a huge amount of money to try another shot at a wedding. He loses a bet and is penniless. This is where he meets Rogers and the rest resolves itself with many pitfalls along the way. There are wonderful musical numbers, including "The Way You Look Tonight," "Pick Yourself Up," "A Fine Romance," and "Never Gonna Dance." Thank goodness he ignored the title of the last one.

You could list a lot of reasons why SWING TIME isn't all that hot, and I'm going to:As always in Ginger & Fred movies, the plot is banal, and SWING TIME adds frequent incoherence to the usual banality;I admit that I'm the only person who appears to be bothered by this, but we have a father who wants to sell his daughter for $25,000. Freddie sees nothing wrong in this. Come to think of it, neither does the daughter, Margaret;The first 15 minutes of the movie are deadly. It isn't the first Astaire/Rogers picture that gets off to a slow start, but SWING TIME takes it to ridiculous extremes. And the laughing gag at the end (probably taken from Laurel and Hardy, a comic team so unique that stealing from them is almost always a mistake. George Stevens got his start as a cameraman for Stan and Ollie) isn't much better;Ricky (George Metaxis) is no kind of rival for Ginger's affections, isn't funny, and is downright slimy;He also miraculously turns into a nice guy at the end. It was grossly obvious that this was done for plot purposes only;And speaking of grossly obvious plot purposes, Penny's (Ginger's) objections to Lucky's gambling come and go at the writers' convenience;SWING TIME is stuck with Victor Moore in the traditional E.E. Horton role. I'm not the world's biggest fan of Horton, but I find Moore one of the least pleasant 'sympathetic' actors that I have ever come across. I've only been able to tolerate him in MAKE WAY FOR TOMORROW, and even there he seemed the weak link in a very great movie;Heck, Moore's completely unmotivated betrayal of Fred's secret engagement during the snow scene might go down as the laziest writing of all time;And I'll stop with the questions: Why does Lucky feel it necessary to keep his engagement from Penny? And why does he feel obligated to complete such a frivolous bargain? Once he's broken poor Penny's heart he feels no compunction in going straight to Margaret to break things off, so why not before when it would have been so much easier?I'd wonder why Penny would go off to marry Ricky but that sort of idiocy seems almost inevitable in the characters played by Ginger Rogers in this series.Yet despite all that, SWING TIME is one of the finest musicals ever made. It has as much right to the title 'Best Astaire/Rogers Film' as any of them, and better than most. A list of its virtues:The Kern-Fields musical score is superb, as great as any in the series;The dances Astaire (with the help of Hermes Pan) devised are without exception masterpieces, even surpassing the sublime achievements of ROBERTA and FOLLOW THE FLEET and TOP HAT;Fred Astaire has continued his gradual improvement as a film actor and gives his finest performance to date in SWING TIME;Ginger Rogers continues her rapid improvement as a dancer and probably hits her peak, a peak that she'll continue through the rest of the RKO series, in SWING TIME;Ginger also gives the best acting performance that anyone ever gave in this series of musicals, and so far as I'm concerned deserved an Oscar for it (looking down the list of nominees, I'd say her only competition should have come from Carole Lombard in MY MAN GODFREY. Of course, Hollywood wouldn't dream of giving anyone a Best Actress nomination for a movie like SWING TIME);These performances were no doubt made easier by the fact that, to a greater extent than in any other of the Astaire/Rogers musicals, SWING TIME has a heart to go along with its laughs;This may be because George Stevens directed it. Stevens was a rising young director at the time who had already shown a penchant for getting top performances from his leading ladies (Stanwyck in ANNIE OAKLEY, Hepburn in ALICE ADDAMS, and Stevens would continue the trend with, among others, Jean Arthur in later pictures). Stevens seemed never at a loss for wonderful ideas. His direction for the 'A Fine Romance' number is sublime, probably the best of any scene in the series. On the other hand, Stevens would lose the pace somewhere in practically all of his films, and the pace in the later ones seemed practically frozen into place. Again, the unique influence of Laurel and Hardy, perhaps the only performers capable of thriving at such a slow pace, may have been harmful to Stevens (this is pure speculation, of course);That snow set and the final design for 'The Silver Slipper' nightclub may be the most beautiful sets that I have ever seen. Likewise, Ginger's dress for the climactic 'Never Gonna Dance' number may be the most beautiful gown that I have ever seen. And the rest of her wardrobe ain't chicken liver, either.SWING TIME is a movie of extremes. The beginning is awful, the laughing gag at the end tedious. In between, you have about the best 75 minute musical that has ever been made. For Fred and Ginger, it would probably never be quite this good again.

Absolutely delightful Astaire and Rogers musical, which finds them at their peak both commercially and artistically . Snappily and often cleverly directed by George Stevens, it additionally benefits from its characterful supporting cast and excellent set design, from the exquisite ballroom interiors to the "exterior" snowbound scenes.The music too is first rate with lovely Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields songs like "Pick Yourself Up", "Never Gonna Dance" and especially "The Way You Look Tonight", this latter, in my opinion, one of the most beautiful love songs ever.The plot is the usual Fred meets Ginger, Fred chases Ginger, Fred loses Ginger before Fred gets Ginger again just in time for the end, Fred this time cast as a professional gambler who's a hoofer on the side while Ginger's a young dance instructor whom he first meets when they squabble over a quarter. Their dance numbers together are fantastic, such beautiful story-telling in each choreography. While I get and appreciate Fred's sincere solo tribute to the great black dancer Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, with Astaire dancing along spectacularly to three inflated silhouettes of himself, the staging now seems very anachronistic, compounded by his doing so in "black-face".There's plenty of humour around too, which has dated surprisingly well even if some of the plot devices centring on of all things trouser-cuffs (or turn-ups as we call them here) and a stereotypical Latino love rival for Rogers' affections are a bit hackneyed. Nevertheless, it's still a vibrant and vivacious, indeed, classic Astaire-Rogers vehicle, a pleasure to watch.

An inexplicable addition to the American Film Institute's Top 100 list in 2007, Swing Time is a mystifyingly stupid movie. If you're compelled to see a Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers musical, go watch Top Hat. Watch it twice. Then rent it. Buy the DVD. You should do all that before you endure the movie that's a terrible representation of George Stevens' talents. I mean, this is the guy who directed Shane!At least the dancing scenes are beautiful choreographed and performed by Astaire & Rogers. You can find those on YouTube though. If you spend 103 minutes with Swing Time, you're going to have to figure out how gullible Lucky Garnett (Astaire) is that he lets his stage "friends" distract him from his wedding. You'll get to "enjoy" Astaire doing a racist number in blackface. You'll be "treated" to a woefully horrible performance by a dopey Victor Moore.You'll also have to go through an entire movie's worth of "will they or won't they" with your "I don't care if they" goggles on. Many (most?) rom-coms put up roadblocks to 2 lovers from becoming lovers, but they've got to create a story worth suspending that disbelief. This movie doesn't make that work very well, although what's worse is how Astaire and Rogers' intendeds handle their respective break-ups. They take it waaaaay better than a real human being ever would.In short, this movie is no good.My wife and I do a podcast about the AFI's 1998 and 2007 Top lists. If you want a better account of our disdain, go to www.top100project.com and check out the "Podcasts" section for 29-minute tear-down of Swing Time. Bev's epic rant at the beginning of the podcast makes this review sound like a recommendation!