Top Hat
Short description
Top Hat is a musical comedy set in a glamorous London hotel, where American dancer Jerry Travers is preparing a new show with British producer Horace Hardwick. Rehearsing his tap steps late one night, Jerry keeps awake the woman in the room below, Dale Tremont, who comes upstairs to complain. The two are drawn to each other at once, but a case of mistaken identity gets in the way: Dale comes to believe that Jerry is Horace, the husband of her friend Madge, and rejects him on that basis, setting off a chain of misunderstandings that also involves the Italian dressmaker Alberto Beddini and Horace's valet Bates. Much of the later action moves to Venice.
Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers star as Jerry and Dale, with Edward Everett Horton, Erik Rhodes, Eric Blore and Helen Broderick in supporting roles. Mark Sandrich directed from a screenplay by Dwight Taylor and Allan Scott, and Pandro S. Berman produced for RKO Radio Pictures. It followed Sandrich's The Gay Divorcee and preceded, among his later films, Holiday Inn.
The film was a major commercial success, taking in about two million dollars worldwide at a time of low ticket prices, and it remains widely seen: it holds a 7.7 rating on IMDb from roughly twenty-two thousand votes and a 7.3 on TMDB from more than three hundred. Critics rated it especially highly, at 9.1 from forty-two reviews, notably above the audience scores.
What's left behind the scenes
- To perform the number in which Fred Astaire (1899-1987) supposedly attacks the other dancers using a cane as a weapon, the props department prepared 13 canes. During filming, Astaire, who always strived for perfection in everything, constantly broke canes out of frustration with his own mistakes, to the point where the film crew began to fear they hadn't prepared enough. Fortunately, the scene was filmed to Astaire's complete satisfaction on the very last cane.
- Before becoming a director, Mark Sandrich studied engineering. Before filming, he would draw a diagram of each scene and always knew exactly where to place the cameras and actors.
- To perform one of the dances, Ginger Rogers (1911-1995) planned to wear a luxurious blue dress with ostrich feathers. Mark Sandrich and Fred Astaire immediately understood that the dress would not work. She was offered other options (including a dress from the previous year's film “The Gay Divorcee”), but the actress flared up and left the set, returning only when the director approved the dress with ostrich feathers. There was no time for rehearsals, and Rogers put on the dress for the first time right before filming. As Sandrich and Astaire had predicted, the feathers immediately began to fall off. Later, as a sign of reconciliation, Astaire gave Rogers a gold pendant in the shape of a bird's feather. The episode with the falling feathers was later recreated in Charles Walters’ “Easter Parade” (1948), where Astaire danced with an awkward partner played by Judy Garland (1922-1969).
- The way Eric Rhodes depicted the Italian Alberto Beddini so offended the Italian government – specifically dictator Benito Mussolini (1883-1945) – that the film was banned in Italy. The same fate befell the comedic melodrama "The Gay Divorcee" (Marco Sandrich, 1900-1945) in 1934.
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