Jerry (Fred Astaire) is a victim of mistaken identity when he happens to fall in love with Dale (Ginger Rogers) in the hotel of his producer, Horace (Edward Everett Horton), and it brings a lot of odd moments in a romance that’s fuelled by tapping feet.

It’s no secret that musicals are basically my guilty pleasure genre of film. I forgive a lot of storytelling problems with films just because the set pieces where the actors are singing are so amazing, which might be why I’m still watching Glee. However, with a film like this where even though each of these set pieces start out with these songs they always expand into these elongated tap dance sequences which I’m sure are fantastic for dance films, but something about them just feel repetitive.

Somehow the dancing just doesn’t always distinguish itself from the first sequence to the final one as much different other than its setting and it just came off as repetitive to me. I know that for a real dance fan I’m sure they see more than what I do, but unlike a film such as All That Jazz where every sequence was distinctly different it just felt like I was watching Astaire and Rogers doing one more dance number that had the same exact motions as the one before.

My feelings on this movie I think echo a lot of my friends’ feelings on jazz music. They see that it’s different and not their normal thing and refuse to like it because they can’t find any of the subtle differences from sing to song. It seems whimsical and uncoordinated, and that’s why I don’t like this movie as much as I should.

When it came to the comedy the film definitely was a movie of its time.  The comedy was all in the actor’s faces and general look of being lost or overly knowledgeable in the scene. Just like when watching a old episode of I Love Lucy where you see a character say something that seems perfectly logical to him and then the next one tells him something that baffles him and we are to laugh as the character’s face changes from a look of witty confidence to bemusement. I guess it’s funny in the old TV shows but here I just found it boring. It’s a victim of age and nothing else.

IMDB says 7.8/10
Rotten Tomatoes says 100%
I say 2.0/10