Mark Sandrich's Shall We Dance, 1937

The choreography was frontally planned, with full head-to-foot framing -- no closeups, no overhead shots.  One has the impression of watching every moment from an ideally placed seat in a theatre.
--Arlene Croce, The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Book (Galahad Books, 1972).

My six-year-old daughter Victoria loves her tap-dancing class so we all decided to watch Fred Astaire this New Year's Eve (she had not yet seen any of his films):  she loved Shall We Dance and so did I.  One of the reasons was that I thought Victoria would enjoy the somewhat vaudevillian humor as well as the dancing.  And she did, especially the verbal routines of Eric Blore and Edward Everett Horton.  A musical comedy is often a tricky balancing act:  for some there is not enough singing and dancing, for others there is too much.  I didn't see many musicals when I was a kid, but even when I was a teenager I groaned when the comedy stopped and the music started.  Now, especially in Astaire films, there is for me never enough dancing and singing.  Not everyone likes Astaire's singing, but I love the way he doesn't try overly to interpret a song but just presents it, leaving most of the interpretation to us. Astaire was quite familiar with the music of George and Ira Gershwin --who did the music for Shall We Dance --  from Broadway, having starred in two of their shows.

Of course there is nowhere near enough dancing, but what there is is glorious, especially "They All Laughed," when Rogers and Astaire start off as antagonists and gradually become a dancing couple.  I rather like the crazy plot of this film, where Astaire as a ballet dancer and Rogers as a tap/jazz dancer gradually merge their styles and where the two have to get married and then divorced in order to convince people that they are not married then end up together after he searches for her in a sea of dancers all wearing a mask of Rogers.  What dancing there is is quite varied, from Astaire solo in the engine room of a ship to Rogers and Astaire dancing beautifully on roller skates in the park.  Mark Sandrich directed stylishly, on art deco sets, letting Astaire and Hermes Pan, his regular choreographer, stage the dances.