Roberta

Over the next week or two I'll be taking a look at a few of the films by director William A. Seiter. To start, there's 1935's Roberta, a Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers film in which the famous pair are playing second fiddle to Randolph Scott and Irene Dunne.

Astaire is the leader of a band from Wabash, Indiana. They have arrived in France after being booked by the Russian owner of a nightclub in Paris. But he wanted Indians, with feathered headdresses, not Indianans. Scott, traveling along with the band, tells them he has an Aunt Minnie who is a famous dress designer in Paris, calling herself Roberta, and maybe she can help them out.

Astaire knows a girl in Paris, too, from back home. He's surprised to find her (Rogers) at Roberta's shop, posing as a Polish countess. She agrees to get his band a job if he keeps her false identity under his hat. It turns out that the band ends up getting a job at that same Russian's club.

Meanwhile, Scott falls for Roberta's assistant (Irene Dunne), while Astaire and Rogers fall in love as comic relief. The highlights of the film are surely their scenes together. They have a wonderful tap dance together, showing great chemistry as they kid around about the old days. Then they share another more elegant number together at the end of the film. Seiter, as usual in Astaire pictures, shoots the dance scenes all-in-one and in one shot--there's almost no cutting in these production numbers, which makes me wonder how many times they had to do it to get it right.

The film is charming and likable, though gets slowed down by Dunne's operatic numbers, where the camera merely is a long closeup. I had no idea that the standard "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" is from this film (actually from the stage musical on which it is based) and when Dunne sings it she really pours on the emotion.