Actors & Personalities · Music & Musicals
“Follies” Is Right! Musical Madness at MGM
Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly barely survive Ziegfeld Follies
Actors & Personalities · Music & Musicals
Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly barely survive Ziegfeld Follies
Music & Musicals · Writers & Critics
“Why, you’d make a perfect shrew!”
On cliche, culture, and locating national identity in Wise’s epic musical
Fred finds out in You’ll Never Get Rich
Actors & Personalities · Music & Musicals
Fred dies, Ginger cries The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle is the not very graceful swan song of the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musicals of the thirties.1 Carefree,[…]
Actors & Personalities · Directors · Silents
“Why are they all ugly little men?” asked Cindy, after I’d dragged her to three solid weeks of Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harry Langdon, and Harold Lloyd at a silent[…]
Actors & Personalities · Music & Musicals · Reviews
Nice work if you can get it When Fred & Ginger went splitsville after Shall We Dance, Astaire decided that he didn’t really need a dame, an idea that tends[…]
Actors & Personalities · Music & Musicals · Reviews
“Let’s call the whole thing off?” Shall We Dance (1937) is the last and least of the great Fred & Ginger musicals, saved from ignominy by a superb score courtesy[…]
Actors & Personalities · Music & Musicals · Reviews
What’s black and white and simply reeks with class? Top Hat is the apotheosis of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. It has five dances, a total they matched in only[…]
Directors · Experimental & Underground
Western Civ gets a brutal debunking courtesy of this South African expat auteur The titles of Ian Kerkhof’s films are both seduction and warning about what to expect from the[…]
Forgotten biopic offers a baker’s dozen of delights Is Words and Music, MGM’s 1948 “and then they wrote” biopic of songwriters Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, a masterpiece? Although long[…]