Shall We Dance (1937)
Directed by Mark Sandrich
Ballet star Petrov arranges to cross the Atlantic aboard the same ship as the dancer and musical star he's fallen for but barely knows. By the time the ocean liner reaches New York, a little white lie has churned through the rumour mill and turned into a hot gossip item—that the two celebrities are secretly married.
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What critics compared Shall We Dance to
This manifests in the first of several mesmerizing sequences of shirtless dance (this one to "Slap That Bass," from the Fred Astaire movie Shall We Dance ), in which Phoenix's sinewy body contorts in twisted rapture.
He is up late at night while his mother sleeps, watching a classic movie on television, “Shall We Dance,” starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.
It pulls heavily from The King of Comedy in its narrative and from Taxi Driver (1976) for its protagonist’s modus operandi, and it seeks out a lineage not of other superhero movies, but of the great works of cinema: Fleck watches the Fred Astaire vehicle Shall We Dance (1937) on TV and Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936) in a cinema, and the marquee of a theater showing Blow Out is featured prominently.
Unless you are a big Richard Gere fan, Shall We Dance is only moderately entertaining.
But any film investor offered a La La Land starring, say, Tony Award winners Sutton Foster and Billy Porter might simply have quoted Fred Astaire in Shall We Dance: "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off!"