Mark Sandrich's The Gay Divorcee (1934)

 For "Night and Day" Astaire adapted his stage choreography, and no more thrilling or musical dance had ever been presented on the screen.

--Arlene Croce

The Gay Divorcee (an e was added to the Broadway play The Gay Divorce) only has ten minutes of Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire dancing, but the dancing is exquisite and holds the movie together.  This is a musical comedy and perhaps has too much comedy, but Edward Everett Horton, Erik Rhodes and Eric Blore (the last two from the original Broadway production) have excellent timing and are often quite amusing.  Unfortunately "Night and Day" is the only Cole Porter song saved from the original play, Though the added songs are okay the final song, "The Continental," goes on much too long.  My guess is that since this was the first starring vehicle for Rogers and Astaire (after their brief appearance in Flying Down to Rio the previous year) RKO was trying to play it safe with lots of comedy and a big production number --obviously influenced by Busby Berkeley -- at the end.  After the success of The Gay Divorcee we saw a lot more of Astaire and Rogers dancing, though never quite enough.

I find it interesting that when Astaire dances alone, as in "Needle in a Haystack," we see more of his ballet background than we see when he dances with Ginger Rogers, not a highly trained dancer.  I was particularly impressed with Astaire's cabrioles when he dances in his hotel room before he goes off looking for Ginger, whom he had first met at customs when her skirt was caught in a locked trunk.  There's always a story underneath their dances, as in "Night and Day" when they begin to know and care for one another.  They meet at a resort where married Rogers has hired a co-respondent in order to get a divorce and, of course, she is led to believe that Astaire in playing that role actually played by Erik Rhodes.

A kind word for Mark Sandrich, who directed the five best of the ten Astaire-Rogers films and whose relatively low-key direction allowed the dancing -- and the comedy -- to delight us. The marvelous Art Deco sets were by Van Nest Polglase and Carroll Clark;  Hermes Pan helped Astaire with the choreography.