I realized tonight while I was combing through my mp3s for love songs that I actually own the two-CD Fred Astaire and Gingers Rogers at RKO compilation. I’ve had it since high school and I’ll forget about it for months at a time then throw it on and dance to “Top Hat” while I’m getting ready.

Without further ado, here is my best-to-worst list of the Astaire-Rogers films:

  1. Swing Time (1936)
  2. Shall We Dance (1937)
  3. Top Hat (1935)
  4. Follow the Fleet (1936)
  5. The Barkleys of Broadway (1949)
  6. The Gay Divorcee (1934)
  7. Roberta (1935)
  8. Carefree (1938)
  9. Flying Down to Rio (1933)
  10. The Story of Vernon & Irene Castle (1939)

Some will quibble with my placing Flying Down to Rio ahead of anything, since it has a totally forgettable A-plot, but the Castles was boring, with Fred and Ginger mainly doing a bunch of old-timey, even for the thirties, dances, and it had no redeeming number with girls dancing on the wings of planes.

Others will quibble with the lowness of my placement of The Gay Divorcee, since it was the film that made them famous and has “Night and Day,” but I would direct you to a) her dress during “Night and Day” and b) “The Continental,” the longest, least plot-advancing, Oscar-winning song ever. The song is literally eight minutes long.

Follow the Fleet and Barkleys are definitely the most underrated; Fleet is pretty charming, plus it has the ever-adorable sailor-on-leave factor, not the mention the killer “Let’s Face the Music” closer with that fur-trimmed sparkly dress and the baroque set that supposed to be on a boat. Barkleys was their swan song. Ginger’s role was originally supposed to be played by Judy Garland, as a follow-up to Easter Parade, but Judy wasn’t well enough to do it, so Fred allegedly flew down to Ginger’s ranch in Montana or wherever and got her to come out of retirement.* They get a do-over of “They Can’t Take That Away From Me,” one of my favourite songs ever, which for some reason they didn’t actually dance to in Shall We Dance. Plus there’s a whole meta-commentary on their careers, in which the Ginger character leaves the Fred character (her partner in dancing and in love) to do more serious dramatic work, just as Ginger broke up the partnership in the thirties.

I love how everything has meta-commentary now.

I’m such a freaking dork.

*I maintain that this in itself would make a wicked movie. I think the story’s exaggerated if not apocryphal. but still, awesome.