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Fred Astaire
Tracing Fred Astaire's life from his birth in Omaha to his death in his late 80s in Hollywood, this book discusses his early days with his talented and outspoken sister Adele, his gifts as a singer, and his many movie dance partners, among them Rita Hayworth, Eleanor Powell, Cyd Charisse, and Betty Hutton.
Book
Glamour in a Golden Age
Shirley Temple, Clark Gable, Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, Bette Davis, Joan Crawford and Norma Shearer, Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo, William Powell and Myrna Loy, Jean Harlow, and Gary Cooper-Glamour in a Golden Agepresents original essays from eminent film scholars that analyze movie stars of the 1930s against the background of contemporary American cultural history.Stardom is approached as an effect of, and influence on, the particular historical and industrial contexts that enabled these actors and actresses to be discovered, featured in films, publicized, and to become recognized and admired-sometimes even notorious-parts of the cultural landscape. Using archival and popular material, including fan and mass market magazines, other promotional and publicity material, and of course films themselves, contributors also discuss other artists who were incredibly popular at the time, among them Ann Harding, Ruth Chatterton, Nancy Carroll, Kay Francis, and Constance Bennett.
eBook
Sex and the Storyworld: Narrativizing Desirability in the Early Films of Fred Astaire
Narrative was, in other words, used as a marketing tool, too. [...]while the goal of most of the films' narrative choices was to market Astaire in conventionally heteronormative ways, such goals did not always match up with results. [...]because I consider the Astaire films that do privilege \"narrativity\" over a \"continuous deployment of spectacle,\" to use Cohan's terminology, I am more interested than he is in the multifarious sexualizing narrative elements that do not stem from or relate to spectacality. Historical Backdrop: The \"In Spite Of\" Star By the time Fred Astaire arrived in Hollywood in 1933, he had already achieved a certain degree of stardom. Since the age of six, he had worked to build up a luminous stage career with his sister Adele, beginning on the vaudeville circuit and winding up as the toast of Broadway and London's West End. Since Astaire got married two days before flying to Los Angeles to begin his film career-and stayed happily married until his wife's death twenty-one years later-his agents and publicists could not exploit or concoct titillating tales of his romantic adventures to enhance his sexual reputation.
Journal Article
Race, Taste, and Fred Astaire
Astaire made propriety thrilling, experimenting with ballroom forms so that waltzes, polkas, and fox trots evolved into complex, emotionally rich works of art that continually offered musical and rhythmic revelations. The ugly simile comparing \"the whole town\" of Harlem to rats alludes to the \"Pied Piper of Harlem\" number that Bill \"Bojangles\" Robinson danced earlier that year in The Big Broadcast of 1936. Arlene Croce, in her 1972 work, The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Book, calls this opening section \"as inventive a group number as any I've seen on the screen-it reminds me of Balanchine,\" and just at this point comes the most Balanchine-like moment. Hermes Pan devised the sequence after seeing a stage light throw three shadows and discovering, to his delight, that RKO's special effects department could produce that effect on a larger scale.
Journal Article
Music makes me
Fred Astaire: one of the great jazz artists of the twentieth century? Astaire is best known for his brilliant dancing in the movie musicals of the 1930s, but in Music Makes Me, Todd Decker argues that Astaire's work as a dancer and choreographer —particularly in the realm of tap dancing—made a significant contribution to the art of jazz. Decker examines the full range of Astaire's work in filmed and recorded media, from a 1926 recording with George Gershwin to his 1970 blues stylings on television, and analyzes Astaire's creative relationships with the greats, including George and Ira Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, and Johnny Mercer. He also highlights Astaire's collaborations with African American musicians and his work with lesser known professionals—arrangers, musicians, dance directors, and performers.
eBook
The Musical as Drama
Derived from the colorful traditions of vaudeville, burlesque, revue, and operetta, the musical has blossomed into America's most popular form of theater. Scott McMillin has developed a fresh aesthetic theory of this underrated art form, exploring the musical as a type of drama deserving the kind of critical and theoretical regard given to Chekhov or opera. Until recently, the musical has been considered either an \"integrated\" form of theater or an inferior sibling of opera. McMillin demonstrates that neither of these views is accurate, and that the musical holds true to the disjunctive and irreverent forms of popular entertainment from which it arose a century ago. Critics and composers have long held the musical to the standards applied to opera, asserting that each piece should work together to create a seamless drama. But McMillin argues that the musical is a different form of theater, requiring the suspension of the plot for song. The musical's success lies not in the smoothness of unity, but in the crackle of difference. While disparate, the dancing, music, dialogue, and songs combine to explore different aspects of the action and the characters. Discussing composers and writers such as Rodgers and Hammerstein, Stephen Sondheim, Kander and Ebb, Leonard Bernstein, and Jerome Kern, The Musical as Drama describes the continuity of this distinctively American dramatic genre, from the shows of the 1920s and 1930s to the musicals of today.
eBook