Let’s Face the Music and Dance

We have an announcement to make, and we will repeat this announcement at the outset of our posts for the next few days. We have been posting new music every day since March.  Your response has been great; however, two things have resulted from this effort.  We are exhausted and cannot get anything else done; and some of you have been overwhelmed by the speed of the releases.  Many have had to catch up one or two days after the initial posting.  For both of our sakes, we are going to start posting new music every other day, starting on Sunday.  You will receive a post today, Friday and Saturday.  Sunday will literally be a day of rest. The next post will be Monday, July 3d.  We will be down on Independence Day, the 4th; then back up on the 5th.

We also have an apology to make. We deviated from a purely chronological exploration in the last post. We should have looked at Jerome Kern’s Roberta (1935) next, after we spent time with Cole Porter’s The Gay Divorcee (1934); but we got carried away with the connection between Irving Berlin and Fred Astaire.  Now, we are going to compound our mistake  by exploring the last collaboration between Max Steiner, Irving Berlin and Fred Astaire/Hermes Pan. Six months after the successful launch of Top Hat (1935), the team came out with Follow the Fleet (1936).

With that in mind, let’s take a look at Follow the Fleet. Again, we have a score written by Irving Berlin just for the movie; all of the songs are fun to listen to.  However, we are going to concentrate on two songs in this post. As a caveat, we strongly suggest that, if you haven’t seen the movie, you ought to watch it. Of course, Fred and Ginger headline the cast; but we have no comic stars as we had previously with Eric Blore, Erik Rhodes, Edward Everett Horton and Helen Broderick. Instead, we have a secondary set of lovers in the form of Randolph Scott and Harriet Hilliard (who you may know better by her married name, Harriet Nelson, mother of Ricky and David and wife of Ozzie Nelson, a band leader at the time of their marriage).  Harriet does a very good job singing “Get Thee Behind Me Satan” and “But Where Are You?”

In Wikipedia, there are some instructive comments from dance commentators Arlene Croce and John Mueller.  According to Arlene Croce on p. 82 of  The Fred and Ginger Book (Galahad Books, 1974): “One reason the numbers in Follow the Fleet are as great as they are is that Rogers had improved remarkably as a dancer.  Under Astaire’s coaching she had developed extraordinary range, and the numbers in the film are designed to show it off.” John Mueller concentrated on the relationship between Berlin and Astaire, as Wikipedia points out from p. 78 of Mueller’s book, Astaire Dancing–The Musical Films of Fred Astaire (Knopf, 1985): “That the film’s remarkable score [Astaire called it one of Berlin’s best] was produced immediately after his smash-hit score for Top Hat is perhaps testimony to Berlin’s claim that Astaire’s abilities inspired him to deliver some of this finest work.”

The first number we are going to embed is the jazz dance number, “Let Yourself Go.” The routine has been called “an energetic duet with much emphasis on galloping kicks, leg wiggling and scampering moves” by Mueller.  We call it exuberant fun. We think that the musical rhythm drives the dance.  So, during the initial song, notice that Ginger only sings for the first two minutes. Her voice just was not capable of handling the difficult nature of the composition. Watch as three chorus girls come into view, one of whom was Betty Grable, at the two minute mark. From then on, Ginger’s voice is dubbed as the music jumps into a new and higher key.  The dance starts around minute 4 and gets going by the 5th minute.  There is so much to watch, you may want to watch it a second time.

Of course, the main course for this movie is the priceless song, “Let’s Face the Music and Dance.” In our view, this dance ranks up there with “Night and Day” and “Dancing in the Dark.” It is all the more remarkable because in the first take, Fred got knocked on the head half way through the routine with the full force of Ginger’s weighted sleeve. When you watch the clip, Fred is usually very careful to stay out of range of the sleeve.  Well, no one is perfect. As he recalled, “I got the flying sleeve smack on the jaw and partly in the eye.” Even more remarkable, he finished the number without recalling any of it.  They did 20 takes of the routine, but in the end, “The No. 1 take was perfect. It was the one we all liked best.”