by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark
Charles and I had a low-keyed evening otherwise during which I finished up leftover chores like five loads of laundry and he made a fish-and-chips dinner for us. It took me a while to find a movie I wanted to watch, mainly because after all those rather dire movies we’ve been watching lately from the cusp of the silent-to-sound transition – even the musicals we’d seen lately, the 1929 Broadway and 1936 Show Boat, had had their dark sides – I wanted something light and frothy. I found it in Royal Wedding, the 1951 film starring Fred Astaire and Jane Powell and casting them as a brother-and-sister dancing couple (even though Astaire was old enough to be Powell’s brother) modeled more or less on the real-life Fred and Adele Astaire. The Astaire siblings had worked together steadily from their early days in vaudeville (coached by their mother, Anna Geilus Austerlitz – “Astaire” was her own contraction of the family’s original name) until 1930, when they starred in a revue called The Band Wagon and added it to a long string of successes despite the Depression. The duo not only performed on Broadway but regularly took their shows to London as well – a lucky thing for posterity because at the time American record companies weren’t recording the original casts of Broadway musicals, but British ones were not only recording the West End successes but making a lot of pounds doing so. So we have surviving records of Fred and Adele Astaire even though virtually no film of her exists – and some of them are accompanied by the dynamite piano playing of the composer of many of their shows, George Gershwin.
The Astaires’ act broke up when Adele fell in love with and married a member of the British nobility while they were performing there, and Fred suddenly had to figure out how to make a living at his chosen craft without her. In 1951 MGM decided to make a movie that would cast Astaire and his leading lady as brother and sister, send them to Britain for a London production of their big New York stage hit Every Night at Seven, and have them both fall in love with British partners – all set against the backdrop of the real-life royal wedding of Princess (now Queen) Elizabeth and Prince Philip. The film’s first big problem was finding a leading lady who could sing and dance well enough to keep up with Astaire. The studio’s first choice was June Allyson, but she had got pregnant from her husband Dick Powell. The second choice was Judy Garland, but her mental state was in tatters at the time and having lumbered to the finish of her film Summer Stock with Gene Kelly, she was in no shape to do another. After she kept missing appointments for rehearsals and costume fittings MGM fired her and left the project once again adrift. When producer Arthur Freed told Astaire that Jane Powell might be available, Astaire said, “Get her – please!”
Like a number of Astaire’s post-Ginger Rogers co-stars, Powell wasn’t known as a dancer – she’d been discovered as a teenager by former Universal studio head Charles R. Rogers, who was hoping she’d be able to duplicate his success with Deanna Durbin at Universal, and she’d been hired by MGM via producer Joe Pasternak, who’d been in charge of Durbin’s 1930’s hits and likewise thought Powell could duplicate Durbin’s success. But Astaire was able to coach her well enough that she held her own in their dances together. Royal Wedding was directed by Stanley Donen after his apprenticeship as co-director with Gene Kelly on On the Town, and he, Astaire and choreographer Nick Castle, came up with some highly inventive dances, including a solo for Astaire in which he practices in the workout room of the ship taking him and Powell to Britain and does his famous dance with a hat-rack as a partner; a scene in which, called on to entertain the fellow cruise passengers during a storm, he and Powell have to dance on a rocking platform with furniture and place settings going after them (I joked about all the Astaire-Rogers movies in which they’d danced on furniture and said, “In this one the furniture is dancing back”), and the famous audacious scene in which Astaire literally dances up and down the walls of his hotel room and does a tap routine on the ceiling. This seemingly gravity-defying routine was done by bolting a fixed camera onto a set that was rotated by a giant motor.
A lot of people credit Astaire with inventing this effect, but it was really created by Buster Keaton for the closing scene of his 1924 comedy The Navigator, in which he and his girlfriend are rescued by a submarine which turns over underwater. (Some of Keaton’s collaborators, including his special-effects genius Fred Gabourie, might have had a hand in it, but given what we know about Keaton’s love of mechanical things I tend to believe he thought of it himself.) Later the same gimmick was used for the scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey in which a flight attendant serves food and drink to Dr. Heywood Floyd (William Sylvester) on a routine commuter trip to the moon. The makers of Royal Wedding had to locate color footage of the real royal wedding – which meant they had to deal with the Gaumont company, because while many companies had filmed the royal wedding, only Gaumont had done so in color. The film also features some quirky songs by composer Burton Lane and lyricist Alan Jay Lerner – who also wrote the script – including “How Could You Believe Me When I Said I Love You When You Know I’ve Been a Liar All My Life?,” which required Astaire to impersonate an overgrown Bowery Boy for his equally low-class girlfriend Powell; and “I Left My Hat in Haiti,” a dazzling production number showing off the glories of three-strip Technicolor even though (something I’ve never noticed about this film before but bothered me this time around) the chorus representing Haitians is white (albeit slightly darkened to represent suntans) instead of Black.
There’s also the charming casting of Keenan Wynn as twin brothers, one who settled in London and one who remained in New York, gabbing on the phone in split-screen and engaging in mutual incomprehension of each other’s slang. (Remember that Lerner’s most famous script was My Fair Lady, his adaptation of Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw, who famously called Britain and the U.S. “two countries divided by a common language.”) Royal Wedding is a pretty typical Arthur Freed musical, not ground-breaking in the ways An American in Paris and Singin’ in the Rain were but striking a nice balance, offering sophisticated entertainment but not too sophisticated to get so far in front of a mass audience that it wouldn’t make money. It’s also the kind of movie that was considered routine in its day but today something this light, straightforward, unpretentious and showcasing this level of musical talent would seem like a Godsend!
