Swing Time (1936)
Directed by George Stevens
Lucky is tricked into missing his own wedding to Margaret and has to make $25,000 so her father will allow him to marry her. He and business partner Pop go to New York where they run into dancing instructor Penny. She and Lucky form a successful dance partnership, but romance is blighted by his old attachment to Margaret and hers for Ricky.
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What critics compared Swing Time to
Chazelle dresses Mia and her friends in colors straight out of a primary crayon box (one of several nods to Demy’s Young Girls of Rochefort ) and places them in a dreamscape that’s tantalizing, bracing, yet naggingly derivative of everything from Swing Time to Cover Girl.
Whiplash writer-director Damien Chazelle’s dazzling, ambitious modern-day musical is fresh yet nostalgic, paying tribute to song-and-dance classics such as Singin’ in the Rain and Swing Time.
“We’re here to take control of an island, and to do it fast – because they’re showing Fred Astaire in Swing Time in the community room at dinner at 4pm,” said Stallone.
…the references to other movies often fall flat (among others, there are allusions to Cabaret, Bonnie and Clyde, Joker, Swing Time, and, of course, Young Frankenstein)…
A project initiated by the grand adventure director Howard Hawks, who was unceremoniously removed in retaliation for the box office disaster that was Bringing Up Baby , the feature Gunga Din ultimately found itself in the capable hands of George Stevens, a director of known rapport with actors and a solid eye for cinema (by this point, he'd already made Swing Time , arguably the finest of all Astaire & Rogers pictures), and while he had never made an action-adventure, he proved quite handy with the form, turning out a finished product that, while probably not as great as whatever Hawks might have done (for the record, he went from Gunga Din to the masterly Only Angels Have Wings ), there's still little arguing that it's not one of the better adventure movies from the 1930s.
RKO even brought in director George Stevens to oversee the film, the director having just created such breezy fare as "Annie Oakley" and "Swing Time," and who would continue in this lightweight vein until after the War, at which time he would get more serious with "I Remember Mama," "A Place in the Sun," "Shane," "Giant," "The Diary of Anne Frank," and "The Greatest Story Ever Told."
It's directed by the serious George Stevens ("Alice Adams"/"Gunga Din"/"Giant"/ "Shane"/ "The Diary of Anne Frank"), the only time he directed the duo in a musical (he directed them each solo one other time).
The best of the Astaire-Rogers films is their fifth, “Swing Time” (1936), directed by George Stevens at a time when he was a king at RKO Radio Pictures (his other credits in that period included “Alice Adams” and “Gunga Din”).