Swing Time (1936)

Film: Swing Time

Director: George Stevens

Country: USA

Released: September 1936

Runtime: 103 minutes

Genre: Musical

Studio: RKO

Influenced: Victor Fleming, Gene Kelly, Robert Wise, Jerome Robbins, Bob Fosse

One of the most popular American film genres of the 1930s was musicals, and the most famous of all the dance partnerships to emerge was that between Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, who co-starred in a series of ten musicals during the age of Classical Hollywood cinema, including Top Hat (1935), Swing Time (1936) and Shall We Dance (1937). Another key figure in this new genre was Busby Berkeley, responsible for the complex and visually stunning choreography in early films like Gold Diggers of 1933 and 42nd Street (both 1933), but Astaire and Rogers took the genre to new heights with their unmatched sense of rhythm and innovative approach to dance routines (with the assistance of choreographer Hermes Pan).

As Zadie Smith says in her 2016 novel Swing Time, which is part homage to the film, it's important to switch off the part of your brain that might be interested in any sense of narrative – the plot in many musicals is almost always ridiculous – and instead see the stories as "roads leading to the dance". What Zadie Smith also addresses in the book is one of the film's most infamous scenes, in which Astaire pays tribute to Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, the well-known black tap dancer of that time, by mimicking the dancer’s style while donning blackface. No other writer is so adept as Smith at navigating through issues of race and class; for Smith, the dance – one of Astaire's most technically impressive in the film, involving dancing with three of his shadows (achieved by trick photography) – could perhaps be seen as an ill-judged tribute rather than mockery. 

Smith's narrator in the novel is fond of the notion that dance is a universal language, capable of transcending race, class and even time, as exemplified by the anecdote of Astaire begging Michael Jackson to teach him to moonwalk. For her, “a great dancer has no time, no generation, he moves eternally through the world, so that any dancer in any age may recognise him”. I can't think of any better way to round off this blog entry than to share the iconic scene from The Little Colonel (1935), in which Bojangles himself performs the staircase dance for Shirley Temple.