Mark Sandrich | Follow the Fleet / 1936

facing the music

by Douglas Messerli

 

Allan Scott and Dwight Taylor (screenplay, with dialogue by Lew Lipton, based on the Shore Leave by Hubert Osborne), Mark Sandrich (director) Follow the Fleet / 1936

 

After two of the most brilliant dance films of all time, The Gay Divorcee (1934) and Top Hat (1935), Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers inexplicably took on a film which stripped Astaire of his elegant tuxedo and ties and his hilarious associates such as Edward Everett Horton, Eric Blore, Helen Broderick, and Erik Rhodes, and plopped him down as a lowly sailor struggling throughout the work to get back on shore. While writers Allan Scott and Dwight Taylor has previously created remarkable farces of wit, suddenly they turned their attention to creating stale gags and a plot that took them in far too many different directions without any significant results except for the lovely, out of place, last number, “Let’s Face the Music and Dance.” Those words indeed seem to best summarize Astaire and Rogers position in this ineffectual musical in which the dancing duo basically took second billing.

     I love and respect Randolph Scott as an actor, but if anybody had suggested that he might be the star of a musical in which he was named Bilge Smith (when I first saw this film as a youth, I hadn’t really gotten to know Scott’s work and life yet) I would have laughed. That the lovely Harriet Hilliard—the future Harriet Nelson—would be the star of any movie is something that perhaps even she would have found incredible, particularly given that the major song assigned this later all-American perfect mother was “Get Thee Behind Me Satan.” I wouldn’t have imagined that Harriet Nelson, or that her character in Follow the Fleet, Connie Martin, even knew Satan, let alone might deign to talk with him.

     And despite the fact that the two previous Rogers and Astaire dance-a-thons has been filled with gay jokes and camp humor while Joseph Breen and his Production Code thugs were tromping around Hollywood in full force, in Follow the Fleet it appears the Hays Board had caught with the writers Scott and Taylor to make it clear they would no longer permit such carryings on, which perhaps “Get Thee Behind Me Satan,” one of Irving Berlin’s oddest works (although later brilliantly sung by Ella Fitzgerald) commemorates.

      Any LGBTQ crumbs left in this basically humorless film were given to Astaire, a man throughout his career basically kept free from any gay association.* But his one suggestive comic line is at least worth repeating.

      As his character Bake Baker enters the Paradise Dancing Club, he pays entry for himself and sailor friends but buys only one 25-cent ticket for himself, the cashier querying him: “Don'tcha friends dance?” Bake responding, “Nah. They're underage. I hold 'em on my lap.”

      Bilge Smith (Scott) gets to pretend he’s not the marrying kind, telling Connie, at this early moment a spinsterish-looking schoolmarm who asks him about the pretty girls he seems to be ogling: “I never given them a tumble sister. Women don’t interest me.” But, in fact, that same year, despite in 12-year on and off relationship with Cary Grant, Scott did marry Marion duPont whom he divorced in 1939.

     And in Follow the Fleet he follows Connie Martin home, Satan having won the battle, and courts the sailor-loving divorcee, Mrs. Iris Manning (Astrid Allwyn), which makes up most of the “plot,” such as it is. “Bilgy” is totally happy with Connie until she mentions that she owns a ship he might command when he leaves the navy, adding in the stipulation of marriage. In this highly sexist comedy, Smith immediately finds a reason to leave and picks up Manning on the street, leaving the poor desolate Connie behind to believe that he’ll drop in the moment the Fleet returns to San Francisco. He returns, alas, to Manning, leaving poor Connie ready to sell the ship she’s just salvaged and run back to her small former home town.

      The secondary couple of this film, Sherry Martin (Rogers) and Bake (Astaire) are already old news before the opening credits, being a former dancing duo who both are eager to join up again, with Bake especially wanting to get married and settle down. Most the of the film consists of the various ways that Bake and the Navy purposely-unintentionally keep the two apart, Bake by his attempt to control Sherry’s career—which may have been somewhat autobiographical given Astaire’s control over his own and his dancing partners’ performances and Rogers’ own attempts to move on to other dramatic roles such as the one she would hook the very next year in Stage Door, playing opposite Katherine Hepburn and Lucille Ball, the latter a minor figure in Follow the Fleet, who gets another fine comic moment. When a sailor tries to put the make on her, she responds: “Tell me, little boy, did you get a whistle or baseball bat with that suit?”

     Although Rogers gets a couple of good lines—telling her brilliant sister how to play dumb in order to get a man, “It takes a lot a brains to be dumb.”—and is awarded the opportunity to hiccup her way through one of her renditions of “Let Yourself Go,” the biggest comic scene involves the only other instance of gay humor.

      In an attempt to raise some cash, Bake offers to teach his fellow sailors how to dance. After demonstrating the basic maneuvers, he breaks them up into “dames” and “partners,” the sailors pairing off until a visiting quintet of Army brass catch the action and attempt to “break in” on the sailors’ dance mates, ending in a free-for-all chaos.

     The rest of this film, fortunately, is all dance, representing several pre-Fosse loose-limbed and even purposely clumsy-looking moves that demonstrate both Rogers’ and Astaire’s roots in modern dance, as opposed to simply vaudeville and music hall hoofing or even in ballroom struts. And, yes, finally there is one of the couple’s very best numbers, wherein we can even see the fine metal-mesh of Rogers’ dress hit Astaire across the shins, like a just punishment for their mutual failures. Seldom has an American dance number begun so darkly, as both he and she are about to commit suicide, only the discovery of one another forcing them to stop in their tracks. Like a Houdini, Astaire mesmerizes Rogers with his hands into the rhythms of a song that demands, despite the “trouble ahead,” to, “face the music and dance.”

      That somewhat cynical attitude was perhaps all Hollywood could do in 1936, given the cultural wars the US had declared on the movies.

 

Los Angeles, April 8, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2023).

  

*There is still no evidence that Astaire was gay or engaged in any homosexual relationship. He worked very closely with his co-choreographer Hermes Pan, however, the two dancing all the routines together in long rehearsals, the casts and crew of the works he did with Astaire describing him as Astaire’s “other.” Pan was a closeted homosexual. Other than Astaire, Pan was also close friends with Diego Rivera and Rita Hayworth.