Don't Blame Joan

I love the performances in this 1937 classic musical comedy. Astaire, Burns, Allen, R. Gardiner, the entire cast were great. Good ol' light hearted movie musical. The dance with the whisk brooms, among other Gershwin Bros. tunes just plain old entertaining. George & Gracie pros at keeping up with Astaire. To me this little movie was a gem to find. Can never get enough of the Master Fred Astaire. To me one of the greatest entertainers to ever live. Nothing but love and respect for George and Gracie. If there such a thing of going back in time, would have loved to see all these actors when they did live stage acts, before their movie & t.v. careers. Enjoy the classic's both dramatic and light hearted fare. All Good Things movie fans.

Other than clips in a variety of programs, I've never endured an entire Fred & Ginger film; I watched this movie solely for George & Gracie (whose TV series I've recently become a fan of -- I find it baffling why its exposure during my lifetime's been limited). Looking at all the comments, the big gripe is that Joan Blondell is not Ginger Rogers -- having no real basis of comparison, I thought Joan was fine in the role. It's a breezy little '30s romantic musical-comedy, the songs are catchy, most of the jokes hold up, the funhouse sequence is truly dazzling, George and Gracie were in tip-top form, and Joan and Fred had decent chemistry. Put Ginger out of your mind and just enjoy it for the goofy little movie that it is.

If you want to blame anybody, blame Michael Balcon, production chief at Gaumont-British studios in the 1930's. Balcon did the world of cinema some incredible favors, including giving Alfred Hitchcock his first chance to direct in 1925 and helping Hitchcock revive his career with the 1934 "The Man Who Knew Too Much" after years of unsuitable assignments at other studios had trashed his reputation. But when RKO came a-calling and asked to borrow Balcon's biggest star, singer-dancer Jessie Matthews, for the female lead in "A Damsel in Distress" opposite her good friend Fred Astaire (they'd got to know each other when Astaire traveled to London to repeat his big Broadway stage hits on the West End), Balcon said no way. He was worried, probably rightly, that once Matthews got to work in Hollywood for studios that could pay her more than he could and offer her superior technical facilities, she'd never want to go back. Denied the performer who more than anyone else could have made this movie work (judging from Matthews' great British musicals, if she'd been in "A Damsel in Distress" audiences would have been going, "Ginger who?"), RKO's next thought was to sign Ruby Keeler, who'd just been released from her Warner Bros. contract. But then they decided that Keeler (though Canadian in real life) wouldn't be believable as a British girl, so they used their one-picture contract with her to put her in the non-musical "Mother Carey's Chickens" after Katharine Hepburn turned it down, and plugged Joan Fontaine into "Damsel" because, even though she couldn't dance, at least she was British.