by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
When I got home TCM was
running one of Fred Astaire’s more obscure movies, The Sky’s the Limit, a 1943 musical made at RKO (Astaire’s last film
for the studio that had made him and Ginger Rogers stars in the films they made
there together) in which his co-star was Joan Leslie, borrowed from Warner
Bros. and fresh from her triumph in Yankee Doodle Dandy with James Cagney, while Astaire was fresh from his two films at Columbia, You’ll Never Get Rich and You Were Never Lovelier, opposite Rita Hayworth. I watched about half of
it — Charles came home while it was on, didn’t recognize it and asked if we’d
ever watched it together (I’m sure we had, but I don’t have a listing for it on
the computer), and I got to see Astaire do a dance with Joan Leslie that’s
surprisingly close in look, feel and actual steps to the great numbers with
Rogers (in his outro to the film Robert Osborne said that a recent book on
Astaire had said that of all his subsequent partners Leslie danced the most
like Rogers) as well as the most incredible number from the film, “One for My
Baby.” Like “Night and Day” and “Change Partners,” this is a song that today is
primarily identified with Frank Sinatra but was actually written for Astaire —
and the song’s mood as presented here couldn’t be more different from the sad,
self-pitying way Sinatra sang it. (Reviewing the Johnny Mercer documentary The
Dream’s on Me — Mercer not only wrote
the lyrics to “One for My Baby,” with Harold Arlen supplying the music, he made
a surprisingly assertive straight-up record of it for his own label, Capitol —
I wrote, “[W]here Astaire made it angry and Sinatra made it sad, Mercer’s made
it rather lighthearted — Astaire’s protagonist literally trashed the bar,
Sinatra’s was probably going to fall asleep in his cups, while Mercer’s was
going to go home, sleep it off and wake bright and refreshed the following
day.”)
Astaire’s “One for My Baby” is one of the great solo numbers of his
career; in the overall film he plays a pilot with the famed Flying Tigers who’s
been given a week’s leave in New York City with his two buddies from the
squadron (one of whom is played by the young Robert Ryan, who puts a lot more intensity and viciousness into what was
supposed to be an ordinary comic villain than writers S. K. Lauren, William T.
Ryder, Frank Fenton and Lynn Root intended), ducks out on a big publicity tour
and tries to live incognito and use his disguise as an ambition-less drifter to
win the heart of magazine photographer Joan Manion (Joan Leslie) — incidentally
Astaire is also playing a character with the same first name as his own: he’s
Fred Atwell but calls himself “Fred Burton” as part of his incognito.
Frustrated at all the roadblocks that have been thrown up in the way of his
affair with Joan — from the ragging of his two Army Air Corps buds to Joan’s insistence
that he get a job either with her boss, Phil Harriman (Robert Benchley in his
second film with Astaire, after You’ll Never Get Rich), a character obviously based on Time and Life publisher Henry Luce, or with Sloan (Clarence Kolb), an airplane company
CEO whom Fred pisses off by telling him in detail exactly what’s wrong with his
planes and how difficult they are to fly in combat — he ends up in the bar of
the fancy hotel where he and Joan met. Of course, it’s quarter to three and
there’s no one in the place except Fred and a bartender who is almost
inevitably named Joe, and as he sings the song Fred gets angrier and angrier
until he literally trashes the bar, breaking
glasses right and left and climaxing by throwing a barstool through the bar’s
heavy glass mirror, shattering it. (Some comments on imdb.com’s trivia page for
this film indicate that Astaire cut his shins and ankles on all the broken
glass, and that RKO got letters attacking them for breaking so much glass in
the movie when ordinary Americans were being urged to turn glass in to be
melted down and reused for the war effort — though I suspect much of the
“glass” in that sequence was actually spun sugar, Hollywood’s usual substitute
for glass when they were doing a sequence in which glass got broken,
accidentally or intentionally.) It’s a stunning number and the song buzzes with
anger during Astaire’s bar-trashing dance — in which, as he did in the “Say It
with Firecrackers” number in Holiday Inn, he manages to suggest drunkenness while still maintaining absolute control over his body —
whereas years of hearing Sinatra sing it have conditioned to regard it as sad.
One alternative book on the Academy Awards (meaning in this case “alternative”
to Robert Osborne’s Academy-sanctioned official history) criticized the Academy
for not nominating “One for My Baby” for Best Song, but in those days the Best
Song nominations were in the hands of the studios, not the Academy. Each studio
picked a song from one of their movies and put it up for Best Song, and the
nominations process just whittled down this list to five before the full
Academy voted one of the five as the winner — and in 1944 RKO decided “My
Shining Hour” (a great song, both as played here by Freddie Slack and His
Orchestra with Astaire singing and he and Joan dancing to it, and as later
covered by John Coltrane on the Coltrane Jazz album on Atlantic) would be their choice for this
film and “One for My Baby” would not. “One for My Baby” is the highlight of an
inconsistent but often marvelous movie (let’s face it, anything with Fred Astaire — even his all-time weakest
musical, Second Chorus — is
worth watching) that also includes “My Shining Hour,” “A Lot in Common” (a duet
for Astaire and Leslie — actually, in Leslie’s case, her voice double, Sally
Sweetland — that includes Astaire asking Leslie, “Where’s Cagney?,” and her
replying, “Where’s Hayworth?”) and a weird snake dance on a table Ryan dares
Astaire to do, threatening to “out” him if he doesn’t. There’s also a nice
in-joke in which, trying to get close to Joan by getting in one of her photos,
Astaire plaintively asks, “Couldn’t I be the fellow who never gets his name
mentioned? The one they call ‘a friend’? You know: ‘Ginger Rogers — and
friend.’” I’d always thought the “Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire
did, only backwards and in high heels” jokes were relatively recent, or at
least post the second-wave feminist movement in the early 1970’s, but here’s a
variant of them spoken by Astaire himself; as Arlene Croce noted in The Fred
Astaire and Ginger Rogers Book, Astaire and Rogers got along personally but were both ferociously
ambitious about their careers, and each wanted to show that they could get
along and have hit films without the other!
