OVP: Carefree (1938)

Film: Carefree (1938)

Stars: Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Ralph Bellamy, Luella Gear, Jack Carson, Hattie McDaniel

Director: Mark Sandrich

Oscar History: 3 nominations (Best Art Direction, Scoring, Original Song-"Change Partners")

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

The partnership of Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers is the stuff of cinematic legend, one of the most iconic pairings in Classical Hollywood.  That the two were at best "fine" with the pairing by 1938 was something that was starting to be reflexive in its box office returns.  Carefree, our movie for today, is the eighth in the ten films that the two made together, and was the first movie starring the two not to turn a profit according to box office receipts at the time.  It was also one of the first films in the series to really mess with the formula of the two, being shorter than you normally saw from an Astaire-Rogers picture, and with far less-dancing.  The result is a quirky (the plot is weird if not unpleasant) little musical with much less of what we'd learned to love from the Astaire-Rogers pairings in terms of toe-tapping.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is centered on Tony Flagg (Astaire), a psychiatrist who has been asked by his friend Stephen (Bellamy) to help make his girlfriend Amanda (Rogers) come to a decision on whether they should be married or not.  Amanda is a successful singer, and isn't sure she's ready to give that life up, or if Stephen is the right guy for her.  Tony puts Amanda under hypnosis, and in the process Amanda comes to (in a trance) and starts destroying property & behaving as a menace.  She also, in the process, begins to start having dreams about her doctor, and becomes convinced she's in love with him, not Stephen.  Eventually Tony realizes after putting Amanda under a trance again (where he instructs her to not like him) that he is in love with her, but at that point it's too late...until of course it isn't when in the end Tony interrupts Stephen & Amanda's marriage, and during one more subconscious session, convinces her he loves her.

As I said above, unlike a lot of Astaire/Rogers films, this one has less focus on the dancing than you'd expect.  At this point in their partnership, the public's interest in the couple was waning, and their careers were headed in different directions.  Rogers was on an upswing, as the success of Stage Door proved she didn't really need Astaire, and within a few years, she'd be an Oscar winner & the highest-paid actress in Hollywood.  Astaire, meanwhile, was in the middle of one of his down swings (we think of him as one of the great performers of the Golden Age, which he was, but that was checkered with several comebacks as he went in-and-out of fashion).  The plot is a bit, silly, but it's kind of fun.  It allows Rogers, in particular, some great comedic moments as she has to wander throughout her hypnotized state, oftentimes for laughs.  But I will admit as someone who just adores Fred Astaire, I could've used one or two more musical numbers.

The film won three Oscar nominations.  The art direction is sublime (isn't it always in Astaire-Rogers musicals?), with gigantic ballrooms, large spacious offices, and a glorious wedding hall among the highlights.  It all feels very modern, but in an elegant way...you can definitely see the money that was clearly spent on this film (the first of the pairings partnerships to lose money).  The scoring is good, though as I mentioned there's only really one number that's of note, and the rest is just sort of there (it's lovely, because of the stars, but there's nothing notable here).  The one number that stands out, though not ultimately in the pairings long pantheon of dancing, is "Change Partners," which is the Oscar-nominated turn.  It's sung at the very end of the picture as Fred is trying to woo Ginger away from Ralph Bellamy, and it's quite lovely-sort of this lovelorn song about a man trying to win back a girl who is with someone else.  It became a standard afterward, and it works quite well within the picture.