CHAPTER 15 | FILM MUSIC 365
of dancing (other dance musicals had just as much
or more) but for its high quality and the use of
dance to further narration and establish charac-
ter. Astaire, who as a star won the right to choreo-
graph these dances and even to help edit them on
fi lm, was a perfectionist who might spend weeks
on a three-minute dance routine. He also brought
to the dancing an unparalleled dramatic fl air and
musical sensibility—his tap dancing was as rhyth-
mically sophisticated as good jazz drumming.
The drama is contained within the dancing, the
only really serious element in the Astaire-Rogers
fi lms. Only rarely do the characters they play show
much distinctiveness; the interest and the fun lie
in how the couple overcome misunderstandings
and other obstacles to a romantic happy ending
through singing and dancing.
The excellence of Astaire and Rogers’ dancing
attracted some of the best collaborators Holly-
wood could muster, including songwriters Irving
Berlin, George and Ira Gershwin, and the team
of Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields. Berlin sup-
plied fi ve songs for Top Hat (1935), one of three
Astaire-Rogers fi lms on which he worked; all fi ve were popular hits in the year
the movie was released, and one, “Cheek to Cheek” (LG 15.1), became a standard.
Like many songs written for fi lm, “Cheek to Cheek” has no verse: more or
less continuous underscoring smoothes the transition from speech to song and
makes the verse, so important in stage songs, unnecessary. Perhaps in com-
pensation, Berlin creates an unusually expansive chorus, seventy-two bars in
length. He doubles the proportions of each section of an aaba song from eight
bars to sixteen; moreover, he adds an extra eight-bar section before the fi nal
a (aabca). In effect the song has two bridges (b and c), sug g est i n g t wo a lter n a-
tive ways that a bridge can provide contrast. Departing from the rhapsodic,
expansive mood of the a sections, the fi rst bridge strikes a more conversational
tone, turning to such unromantic subjects as fi shing and hiking. But instead of
returning to the a section to match the earlier emotional scale, Berlin ratchets
up the emotion even further in the second bridge, with its declamatory melody
and tension-fi lled harmonies. The fi nal a section is then felt as a relaxation of
the intense c section.
With those seventy-two bars, Berlin’s work on “Cheek to Cheek” was done.
Ensuring its integration into the fi lm was the work of other, less celebrated
craftsmen: the fi ve arrangers who, under the direction of music supervisor Max
Steiner, developed Berlin’s song into a six-and-a-half-minute routine includ-
ing (1) a complete statement of the song as instrumental underscoring for dia-
logue, (2) Astaire’s vocal performance of the complete song, and (3) instrumental
accompaniment for a three-minute dance, in which the song’s fi ve sections are
repeated, reordered, and sometimes truncated to suit the choreography. Both
on Broadway and in Holly wood, arrangers played a key role in making the musi-
cal numbers the highlight of shows.LG 15.1K In this scene from the
193 5 fi l m Top Hat, Ginger
Rogers and Fred Astaire are
dancing to Irving Berlin’s
“Isn’t This a Lovely Day?”172028_15_361-385_r3_ko.indd 365 23/01/13 8:36 PM