Nice Work, Darling, Nice Work
<This essay was first published in a short form in the Times Literary Supplement of February 27, 2004. Robert Gottlieb published this complete original in his 2008 anthology Reading Dance.>
It does us all good to read the original reviews of enduring hits. "Top Hat is a vehicle... for Mr. Fred Astaire's genius," wrote Graham Greene in 1935. “It doesn't much matter that the music and lyrics are bad. Mr. Astaire is the nearest approach we are ever likely to have to a human Mickey Mouse; he might have been drawn by Mr. Walt Disney, with his quick physical wit, his incredible agility. He belongs to a fantasy world almost as free as Mickey's from the law of gravity, but unfortunately he has to act with human beings and not even Miss Ginger Rogers can match his freedom, lightness, and happiness."
Greene was so pleased with the Mickey Mouse point that he developed it in his 1936 review of Astaire and Rogers in Follow the Fleet. "If one needs to assign human qualities to this light, quick, humorous cartoon, they are the same as the early Mickey's: a touch of pathos, the sense of a courageous and impromptu intelligence, a capacity for getting into awkward situations. though Miss Ginger Rogers will never quite attain Minnie's significance (she is too brazen and self-sufficing for the part)."
Mickey and Minnie? Today, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, in the nine black-and-white films they made together for RKO between 1933 and 1939, are archetypes just as standard as Disney's two characters. The "bad" music and lyrics in Top Hat, by the way, are by Irving Berlin; they include such songs as "Isn't This a Lovely Day (To Be Caught in the Rain),""Top Hat, White Tie, and Tails," and "Cheek to Cheek." (When the film had been released two months earlier in the United States, all five of its songs went straight into the top fifteen of the hit parade in a week.) As danced by Astaire and Rogers, "Isn't This a Lovely Day" and "Cheek to Cheek" are classics as familiar as Disney's Steamboat Willie. We have to spend a little time puzzling over any Fred-Mickey Ginger-Minnie likeness ("many critics have noted the resemblance," wrote Greene), because Greene was missing the point. By the time Follow the Fleet filled the silver screen, Astaire and Rogers were living legends.
When John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John came together in Grease, when Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean teamed up on ice, they excited hopes that Fred and Ginger had satisfied better. When a dance/love movie comes along like Grease, Dirty Dancing, Strictly Ballroom, pretty soon it gets compared to the RKO series: not to its advantage. Every few years, a season of all these Astaire-Rogers films comes around - maybe on TV, or maybe (as this February) at the National Film Theatre. To revisit Fred and Ginger is to return to the greatest archetype of danced romantic love in film, and one of the enduring archetypes of love in popular culture.
It often seems that, when Astaire arrived in Hollywood in 1933, he caught a wave. Musicals had just entered a peak era onstage - this was the era of Jerome Kern, Berlin, the Gershwins, Cole Porter -and all-speaking all-singing all-dancing movies had now begun to tackle them. Astaire made his screen debut as Joan Crawford's partner in MGM's Dancing Lady in 1933: his small contribution is the best thing in the movie. It was everybody's good luck that RKO teamed him with Ginger Rogers in Flying Down to Rio that year (fifth- and fourth- billing), and that RKO then built upon the success of their “Carioca" partnership. Their next film, The Gay Divorcee (a smash hit), arrived just as cinema happened to embark upon a rich new era of romantic comedy.
Astaire had been working hard for years to help create that wave. He had been a dance star in both London and New York (and on records) before Mickey Mouse was born, after all. Performing with his sister, Adele, he had helped to bring musicals to their peak in the 1920s: It was he who introduced such Gershwin numbers as "Fascinating Rhythm," "Funny Face," and "My One and Only" to the world. And he choreographed, or was choreographer-in-chief, of all his own dances. Records show how assiduously, between the 1920s and 1930s, his singing matured, in musicianship and in emotional command. The oh-gosh-oh-golly Puck became an authoritatively lyrical Berowne. Cole Porter wrote "Night and Day" (for the stage production of The Gay Divorcee, 1932) specifically for him. In it, he fluently covered a range of an octave and a half, a tessitura he would often span in the great songs he was to introduce in the following two decades. Songwriting was a major hobby of his own, and his input into the songs he launched was considerable. The romantic comedy of divorce and remarriage in The Gay Divorcee owed something to Noel Coward's Private Lives, but Coward already owed something in turn to Astaire, with whom he had taken dance lessons. Adele Astaire had just left the stage to marry into the British aristocracy; Astaire used The Gay Divorcee and his new partner, Claire Luce, to break out into a genre new to him, the dance duet as an expression of serious amorous attraction. As for Hollywood, Astaire had scarcely arrived there than-diverging completely from the Busby Berkeley model already established at Warner Bros. —he painstakingly set new directorial standards for how dance should appear on screen. "Either the camera will dance," he said, "or I will."
The main Astaire rules for filming dance went as follows: Show the dance from head to toe without close-up, film it in as few takes as possible, and run it from start to finish without reaction shots. Though the Astaire films didn't invariably follow all these rules to the letter, few subsequent dance films have even tried. It's dismaying to see how often, even when a ballet performance is being relayed to us live on TV, camerawork chops up the dancing. Fred and Ginger, by contrast, really do dance several of their duets in a single take, some of them almost three minutes in length. In the annals of cinema, these takes should stand beside the finest feats of D. W. Griffith, Ernst Lubitsch, Alfred Hitchcock, and Orson Welles. Yet here such is the art that conceals art that you may easily forget the camerawork altogether. What you can't miss is dance. And emotion. No films have ever trusted dance, and dancers, as did Astaire's.
“He gives her class and she gives him sex," said Katharine Hepburn, who appeared as co-star to Rogers in another well-known RKO movie, Stage Door (1937). Actually, such sex as Astaire ever really demonstrated on screen he had already discovered onstage dancing "Night and Day" James Agate, reviewing the West End premiere of The Gay Divorcee, enlarged on this: "Sex so bejewelled and beglamoured and be-pixied that the weaker vessels who fall for it can pretend that it isn't sex at all but a sublimated, Barriesque projection of the Little Fellow with the Knuckles in his Eyes. ... It was said of Kean that he acted 'all around' people; Mr. Astaire dances all round Miss Claire Luce, now shepherding her, now buttressing, here giving her the floor, and there taking it with her in mutual rapture. It is legerdemain accomplished with the whole body, with the result that the eye endlessly follows that which in second-rate artists is second nature, but in first-rate talent is Nature itself." And class? Some sheer refinement did rub off on Rogers - along with so much else. Watching her grow as an artist on screen during her films of the 1930s is fascinating. But part of what's compelling about her in that period is how unclassy she remains. Even in their screen version of "Night and Day," which seems to have contained plenty of the stage original made for Luce, an element of what makes Rogers so refreshing is the tough Jean Harlow streak in her; it's even there in her stride. Dancing "Let's Face the Music and Dance" in Follow the Fleet, three films later, she had become sublime. She hadn't, however, become one of Hollywood's ladies. Like Barbara Stanwyck, she's classless.
We're among Americans in Paris. Lizzie/Rogers has just sung "I’ll Be Hard to Handle" in rehearsal at the Café Russe. Huck/ Astaire, who's been conducting her and his band of Wabash Indianians, throws away his baton and says "Nice work, darling, nice work." Then, while the band plays through the number again, they start to reminisce about the old days when they first worked together back in America. She: "You know, I think I was in love with you then, Huck." He: "I know you were.... And what's more I was madly in love with you."They They stay casual. Mainly they banter; they're musical professionals. As they saunter onto the dance floor, she pulls up a leg by way of warm-up. He, whenever he reckons his teasing has scored a point, delivers a little "gotcha" tap burst. Once, rebuking him, she softly shakes her fists at him. Just as softly, he catches her wrists in his hands.
Now the camera shows them full-frame, head to heel; and the take that follows lasts to the end of the dance. Still holding her, but now with one hand moving surely to the back of her waist, he leads her into a walk. It's a don't-you-remember walk, until, at the end of the phrase, he suddenly arches right back, pulling her with him, so that they tip together, enough to make it a matter of risking her balance and his. From here on though there remains a rich didn't-we-used-to-have-fun underlay we're in the present tense, fast and funny. The stops and starts, the hesitations and sudden spurts, the fun of finding how well they work together again, even the little mime/ dance quarrel, a whole series of suddenly-tipping-over-together steps, the excitement of finding they're together in rapid side-by-side hops and tap phrases, the whirling spin-turns: the alchemy of dancing with a partner has never been made more immediate.
The film is Roberta. It's the third they made together, it has a superb Jerome Kern score, and, when new in 1935, it made a strong impression. Alas, no Astaire-Rogers movie is less well known today. (MGM bought it in 1945 and withdrew it from circulation. The plan was to do a re-make, which came up in 1952 as Lovely to Look At, with Marge and Gower Champion replacing Astaire and Rogers. I derive this and much other information from John Mueller's 1986 study Astaire Dancing.) Since the 1970s, Roberta has emerged from obscurity. But it still crops up far less often than the other Fred-and-Ginger classics, and you have to hunt much harder to find a copy on video. (There is no DVD as yet.) So, if you show "I’ll Be Hard to Handle" to a good many people who reckon they know about Fred and Ginger, you can still take many of them by surprise. I have never known the effect to be other than revelatory. Of their many great dances, this is the first that reached the screen in one take; and it still feels the freshest. The dance keeps catching them up in its own bliss.
It contains a particular bubble of spontaneity. Whereas earlier dances in Astaire films had been performed on red linoleum (in black-and-white, it looks grey), the dance floor here had been made, at Astaire's behest, from hard maple. And whereas usually he and his dance assistant Hermes Pan usually went over the soundtrack afterwards, to dub the taps in with full brightness, here the experiment was to record the sound of the dance live. So, though a few taps here sound, by Astaire's standards, a bit muzzy, the pay-off is that you can hear tiny laughs and soft giggles from Ginger, happy little gasps from both of them, and, as they tear into the top-speed highest-energy concluding section, even a happily roaring little "Oh!" from Fred. In that same passage, a lock of Ginger's hair comes loose and she even seems to try to blow it out of her eyes in high good humour while dancing. But the take continues till, at the end of some 2'51", they subside together onto some upright chairs. (In the next take, Ginger's hair is back in place.) The role of Lizzie was just what Rogers needed after The Gay Divorcee: this time, nobody could think she was just a substitute for Claire Luce. ("Glad you liked Roberta - it is dynamite in the box-office here in this country," Fred wrote to Adele. "You didn't say how you liked the dances. They're all new you know babe!")
"You must learn to walk first," says Penny/ Rogers the dance instructor in Swing Time (1936) to Lucky/ Astaire, who is pretending to be a hopeless student. And they just walk the dance floor, side by side, back and forth. Her precept is more satisfying in an Astaire movie than it could be anywhere else, because it applies to so many of his great dance duets. I love the old feminist joke "Remember that Ginger Rogers did everything that Fred Astaire did, only backwards and in high heels," but the truth is that they did a great deal of it side by side.
The most beautiful example of all occurs, again, in Roberta - their other duet, to "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes." Whereas in "I'll Be Hard to Handle" they were in high-waisted rehearsal trousers, here they're the epitome of glam-our. He is in the white tie and tails that are part of his legend; she is a stunningly simple black shoulderless gown; their dance is the crowning event of the fashion show at Roberta's on the Avenue Montaigne. They are, as Astaire was to sing in his next movie, "Steppin' out, my dear, / To breathe an atmosphere/ That simply reeks with class"; and instead they breathe it as if it were purest ozone. Slow, slow: the whole dance feels like a single glide around the floor. One can point to a number of highlights - the rich backbend Rogers does with one of his hands on the small of her back, their sudden chain of turns together, her glorious supported swan-queen fall, and the slow, sumptuous recovery — but the most bewitching passages occur while they're simply walking, side by side, in tempo. The first is as they descend four steps onto the dance floor. Without breaking the fox-trot-style flow, they take a Little quick-quick step, back together up a step, before carrying on down, down. The other, after their most expansive passage, is when he, so gently, presses her head to nestle into his shoulder, an image of intimacy that Rogers, her eyes lowered, plays with an uncannily serious absorption, as he steers her back into a walk.
In three of their nine RKO movies Flying Down to Rio (1933), Roberta, and Follow the Fleet (1935), you could excise Astaire and Rogers altogether and you'd still have the main narrative. But, secondary as their characters are in those films, their final duets achieve something else, embracing the emotion of the more central characters, while rising up above the story. In “I’ll Be Hard to Handle" and, yet more astonishingly, "Let's Face the Music and Dance" (Follow the Fleet), they present a serious emotion that gathers up and embraces what's going on between the main couple and presents it in a transcendentally lyrical image. And the unaffected cool of their performance brings about another marvel. Watching and listening, we feel as if we are Fred and Ginger; their body-language is so direct, so unadorned.
On one level, it often seems that the nine Astaire-Rogers RKO films are all overlapping aspects of the same world, each a retelling of the same basic story. (Even their one colour film, The Barkleys of Broadway, made in 1949 for MGM, feels like a sequel, albeit best forgotten.) The stories tend to be similar, the same supporting actors turn up, Fred gets to dance in white tie and tails for at least one big scene in almost all, and there are harmless in-house connections from movie to movie. Because of these and other connections, it's almost impossible not to feel that, in their sixth RKO film, Swing Time, their ardently elegiac one last dance together, "Never Gonna Dance," is more than a farewell between Penny and Lucky, each reluctantly engaged to someone else. It feels as if Fred and Ginger themselves are saying good-bye to all that. At the end of their ninth, The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle, their final meeting is for one last waltz. Containing the feelings of Vernon and Irene at this point in their lives, this also embodies the great romantic secret of the whole series of films: they present the dance to the public, while focusing poignantly upon each other. Only in the Castles and the preceding Carefree did Astaire ever kiss Rogers. As he later remarked: "Saying 'I love you' was the job of our dance routines."
On another level, each Astaire-Rogers movie really is unique in the hue in which it views romance itself. Early on in Flying Down to Rio (1933), an American girl asks enviously, "What have these South Americans got below the equator that we haven't?" When Fred and Ginger join in the Carioca, they've got it beneath the equator too. The distance between their swaying pelvises is as charged, as delicious, as the contact between their two fore-heads. In The Gay Divorcee, romance is heavily laced with intrigue. The story mixes seriousness about true feeling with a Wodehousian sophistication-cum-frivolity about everything else. The mix colours both the ardour of “Night and Day" and the glee of "The Continental." Top Hat exists in a kind of fantastic innocence, an idyll artificial right through to the adorable toy-Rialto bridges of its never-never Venice. Nobody save Fred and Ginger seems to be serious about marriage, sex, or love for a moment; and the romance between Fred and Ginger, even when at its most serious in the big whirls and falls of "Cheek to Cheek," seems Edenic. (There's even a running joke about Fred's character Jerry being Adam, "this gardener of Eden," with whom Ginger imagines wearing fig leaves.)
Even though Follow the Fleet has the crummiest plot of the whole series, the vitality of its West Coast demotic tone makes this their most intensely American movie of all. The Navy comes into port, Fred chews gum in uniform, Ginger auditions for jobs, and bugle-call tap salutes abound. In a play-within-the-film climactic dance to "Let's Face the Music and Dance," they play characters-beyond-characters, transcendently elevated, and they make this little scene about despair not an escape from, but the overarching justification of, the movie. Swing Time is a never-gonna-dance never-gonna-marry Depression story set in a believable New York, Its laughter and anguish intermingle in a tender melancholy all its own, one that suffuses its audience. It's the supreme dance musical, dearly beloved of many but this sad/happy emotion, constantly varied through the movie and crucial to its spell, is why it can't top Top Hat as the popular idea of the ultimate Astaire-Rogers vehicle. When Swing Time winds its plot up with an everybody's-laughing "There isn't going to be any wedding" solution, the audience laughs far less than the characters on screen. There's been memorable comedy earlier in the movie, but by now our response to the situation is too choked; and our distance from their laughter is part of the strange poignance that this comedy leaves in the mind.
Shall We Dance, whose basic plot is as farcical as any, suddenly tries in its last half-hour to capture the same big seriousness of feeling, most beautifully when Astaire sings "They Can't Take That Away From Me" to Rogers. But this is a story about two dancers, and they just don't dance together enough. I don't care greatly for Carefree (1938), but nobody could miss the strong new tones of its mixture of dream-fantasy and hypnosis-release. The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle (1939), by contrast, is thin, retro, and, after the first half-hour, so easy to love. Any little suspense about whether he will marry her is over in the first half-hour; any little suspense about whether they will enjoy success as a dance duo evaporates in the next half-hour. The film's spell lies all in the dances, along with the unlooked-for twist at the end. He dies: the only unhappy ending in the series.
It may seem that the "novelty" dances that occur in these movies serve little narrative purpose. But I find that the Carioca, the Continental, the Piccolino (in Top Hat), the Yam (in Carefree) become the epitomes of their respective movies. The beauty of The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle as a subject is that it's a bio-pic about a couple who, twenty years before Astaire and Rogers, had introduced one novelty dance after another to an exultant world: the Castle Walk, the Tango, the Maxixe, the Hesitation Waltz. Another novelty dance is the "Waltz in Swing Time," a rushing waltz richly overlaid with tap sophistication, and they dance it blithely. It's Swing Time's true high, and the plot lays considerable suspense on whether they'll ever get to dance it. (After they've done so, it feels like the paradise they keep trying to regain.) Astaire and Rogers dance it in one take, and they never stop. Swirling, tapping, they pour themselves in a single spiralling path around the ballroom. They're never further from each other than arm's length, and the main image the dance leaves with us is that they're rapturously pinned to each other as they whirl around. Yet they're never close to us; they stay further away from the camera than in any other of their great dances. If Walter Pater was right that all arts aspire to the condition of music, the "Waltz in Swing Time" is where Astaire and Rogers most fully achieve that goal. Its music would seem incomplete without them. Part of its soundworld is its heart-stopping sudden hushes that allow us to hear their feet.
Astaire was an all-round musician. In these movies, you see him conduct-ing, playing piano, singing, playing accordion, harmonica, and percussion, often with breathtaking stylishness and skill. As a singer, he was the first to perform a dazzling number of the last century's finest songs; and his phrasing as a singer loses nothing by comparison with that of Bing Crosby or Frank Sinatra, whose voices were so much more richly endowed. It was Astaire who, in the 1943 movie The Sky's the Limit, first sang the Harold Arlen/Johnny Mercer number "One for My Baby and one more for the road)," later a Sinatra standard: a case in point. Though the arts of Jerome Kern and Irving Berlin had long been mature, Astaire brought them both to new peaks, and both composers acknowledged him as their best interpreter. For dance devotees, Kern's two Astaire-Rogers films, Roberta and Swing Time, can never be topped.
But it is principally because of his work with Astaire that I call Berlin the greatest dance composer of the twentieth century. The great musical career that spanned from "Alexander's Ragtime Band" to "I've Got the Sun in the Morning and the Moon at Night" never so perfectly encapsulated the moods of popular culture in imperishable songs as he did between 1935 and 1938 in "Isn't This a Lovely Day (To Be Caught in the Rain)?", “Top Hat, White Tie, and Tails," "Cheek to Cheek," "Let Yourself Go," “I'm Putting All My Eggs in One Basket," "Let's Face the Music and Dance," and "Change Partners and Dance." As singer, choreographer, and dancer, Astaire responded to the internal variety of these Berlin numbers, and to their sheer naturalness. He is the greatest dancer we have ever seen, and yet there are times when his singing of a Berlin song is yet more marvellous, to watch as well as to hear, than the dance that follows. Arlene Croce, in her definitive study The Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers Book, describes "Cheek to Cheek" as an example of this. As another, I would suggest "Change Partners and Dance." Gently though he delivers it, the urgent undercurrent of his singing creates an insidiously alluring effect through the mid-line rests, as if beaming it through from his head into hers: "You have danced <rest> with him since the music began. <rest> Won't you change <rest> partners <rest> and dance with me?" In "Isn't This a Lovely Day," I would hold the way he carries his voice tenderly down through the words "rain" and "storm" beside the most beautiful portamenti of Caruso, Leider, and Callas.
And if there is one thing that can steal your attention from Astaire's singing of a classic song, it must be the way Rogers listens. She could put across a song vividly herself. (Her "I'll Be Hard to Handle" is irresistible, and my favourite Berlin song of all is her "Let Yourself Go," with its intoxicating shifts of metre and key.) But has anyone ever listened more beautifully than she did in the 1930s? She was his ideal partner not simply because of her beauty as a dancer, but because of her complete responsiveness. Which is present in the way she pays attention, sometime without moving a muscle, yet always in character. Rogers changed her hairstyles and, more startlingly, her voice from one film to the next; but her real acting occurs way beneath the surface: she has a different nervous system in each role. To watch her change from the impulsive deep-voiced heroine of Carefree (1938) to the loyal, still girlish muse of The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle (1939) is unsettling. By the seventh film, Shall We Dance, the makers of these films made almost too much of an event out of the brimming eyes with which she hears his delivery of "They Can't Take That Away From Me." The most haunting examples of her listening occur in the earlier movies, nowhere more wonderfully than in "Let's Face the Music and Dance." Here, though she paces across the stage, her face is almost numb, a mask drained of emotion. Only the eyes move. Her face remains cool when she's dancing the exalted duet that follows (another single take). Like Astaire, she trusts the medium to express everything: in this respect, they're both modernists in motion. The duet gathers a terrific pace through its many stops and starts, but the dynamics stay muted. It's like thick cream flowing fast.
One marvel of style in these movies is the way that Astaire moves from speech into song; a second is how he moves from song into dance. Did Berlin design two of Top Hat's songs to showcase both these? Everybody remembers the explosive dance that Astaire does in the hotel room that wakes Dale/ Ginger up in the room below, but just as marvellous is the intro-duction. "In me you see a youth who's completely on the loose," says Jerry/ Astaire, sitting on the arm of a sofa, his hat holding a newly lit ciga-rette, to Horace/Edward Everett Horton. "No yens, no yearnings, no strings, and no connections, no ties to my affections": he's begun singing in mid-sentence! It's as if the idea of the rhyme is what's made his voice take wing. The same device occurs with "Cheek to Cheek," where he says to her, "All I know is: I'm in heaven," singing only as he reaches the noun. "Heaven / I'm in heaven / And my heart beats so that I can hardly speak: / And I seem to find the happiness I seek / When we’re out together dancing/ Cheek to cheek.”
But the number he sings to Horace, "No Strings (I'm Fancy Free)," keeps steadily moving up from gear to gear. As the song gathers emphasis, he rises, clicks his fingers, does dance gestures all, of course, in the same ongoing take. Now the camera cuts in for a new take that raises the excitement in the way he pours himself a drink while singing, putting down the decanter bang! like a loud tap. Better yet is the way he times two whooshes of the soda-syphon, and then, singing full-voiced, "So bring on the big attraction." suddenly he delivers what looks like an entrechat-six (an un-Astaire-like step), "my decks are cleared for action," and now he can't keep from dancing. The whole thing has been a crescendo, building since he was chatting; instead of a climax, Ginger knocks on the door to interrupt his flow; and then the sand number — whereby, dancing again on her ceiling, he puts her, Horace, and himself to sleep - is the enchanting diminuendo conclusion to the scene. (As late as the 1980s, revival cinemas would sometimes show versions of Top Hat from which the whole sand dance had been cut; and in the NFT's 1983 Astaire-Rogers season, several of the films had infuriating lapses of sound-picture synchronisation. It's good to realise that some standards have risen.) Astaire's solos in these films are all endlessly rewatchable. You get lost in his rhythm: how he works around the music, against it, onto it. His arms can have as much punch as his feet but mainly they stay amazingly informal. And, even in those later solos where he confines himself to a narrow space, his whole body keeps changing outline. With him, a mere transfer of weight can be a major event in terms of shape, timing, and drama.
Before she joined him at RKO, Rogers had plenty of musical experience. Like him, she had introduced Gershwin songs on stage ("Embraceable You," “But Not For Me"); and in Hollywood she had already appeared in Busby Berkeley musicals. What the Astaire movies revealed in her, indeed developed, was a body of breathtaking beauty. Whereas the legs of Betty Grable (who does bit roles in two of these Astaire-Rogers movies), so famous in the Second World War, no longer seem remarkable, and whereas most 1930s ballerinas exemplify physical types that are no longer quite our ideals, Ginger's physique is still gorgeous today: the ravishing slenderness of the legs, the lovely curves of the waist, the lush mobility of the back. And it's powerfully expressive.
Astaire went on to dance with other distinguished screen partners - Eleanor Powell, Rita Hayworth, Ann Miller, Judy Garland, Cyd Charisse, Leslie Caron, Audrey Hepburn, and others. He was always a model partner; some of his later duets are choreographically distinguished. You can argue that his best duets with Hayworth and Charisse are finely conceived as metaphors for serious emotion; certainly his duets with Powell are inventively brilliant outpourings of pure virtuosity. But in no important way has their quality of expression developed upon those he did with Rogers - whereas in the 1940s his art went on growing in his solos, which developed a remarkable new vein of abrasiveness. After Rogers, there is never quite a moment when the dance feels suffused by the love that the story at that point is usually about. Only with Rogers or when alone could Astaire unite feeling and form.
@Alastair Macaulay