Top Hat
Directed by Mark Sandrich | Music & Lyrics by Irving Berlin | Choreography by Astaire and Hermes Pan
USA ⎮ 1935 ⎮ Fiction ⎮ 99 min
Host Venue: Main Street Landing
This event is part of Global Roots Film Festival: Why Sing, Why Dance?
Festival Passes are available HERE. It is highly recommended to purchase a Pass although individual tickets are also available. If you purchase a Pass you need not book individual screenings – just bring your pass to the door. Seating is on a first-come first-served basis.
Passes :
General Admission – $40
VTIFF Patron Members – $32
Students – $20
VTIFF All Access Members – FREE.
Top Hat is the 4th and most iconic of the movies Fred Astaire made opposite Ginger Rogers, and was the first film to be written specifically as a vehicle for Fred and Ginger. The Irving Berlin score includes “Cheek to Cheek,” “Isn’t it a Lovely Day?,” and the jaunty title song. It centers on a typical mistaken-identity plot, with wealthy Dale Tremont (Rogers), on holiday in London and Venice, assuming that American entertainer Jerry Travers (Astaire) is the husband of her friend Madge (Helen Broderick) — who’s actually the wife of Jerry’s business manager Horace Hardwick (Edward Everett Horton)… and so it goes on.
The choreography of the dance numbers is flawless: Astaire believed that movie dance numbers should be shot in unbroken takes that ran as long as possible, and this lends a fluidity to the movement that belies the difficulty for the dancers. What Astaire and Rogers perform is an achievement in endurance as well as artistry.
“Because we are bound by gravity and the limitations of our bodies, because we live in a world where the news is often bad and the prospects disturbing, there is a need for another world somewhere, a world where Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers live.” ~ Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times