William Hazlitt said that comedy arose at disjunctions in society, when people saw people as strangely juxtaposed. He might be thinking of the humor Samuel Johnson found in a woman preacher Johnson had compared to a dog walking erect: managing it but not very well. People a hundred years ago might find amusing minstrels or white people in blackface, though in present times that seems very offensive rather than an expression of artistic freedom in that blackface allowed people to be more uninhibited. Similarly, comedians in vaudeville found that the comedy was funnier if they used foreign accents or adopted foreign identities, such as Jewish or German or Chinese.. Such features can illuminate the culture and structure of the moment rather than simply provide a way to disdain it. The same is the case with the plots in Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movies, meant to be amusing fluff and just interludes between seeing the heavenly and always uplifting dancing, when what they do is make funny the moment when men and women banter with one another about their situation, as it was for the moment, about how men and women could engage one another in courtship. So let us look at the comedy as sociology, particularly in “Top Hat” and “Swingtime”, those musicals produced respectively in 1935 and 1937, long before the first women's march in the Seventies, and also by counterpoint in “Follow the Fleet”, a service comedy in 1936 and directed by the same Marc Sandrich who had directed the other two.
The girl and boy who are to engage in romance meet cute, where in “Top Hat” while in “Swingtime” the Fred character wants to get back his lucky quarter from the Ginger character who used it a vending machine. That is itself significant. Women are up and about going to business and shopping and managing their own lives while living alone and so meeting men who are strangers in the course of the day, free to encourage them or not, while the men try to find ways to please the women that they find attractive. This is no longer a world of arranged marriages, where there are formal introductions through family connections, but rather what we think of as romantic relationships, where people meet by coincidence and gradually or not become emotionally tied to the other for no other reason than their individual personalities, even though the attributes of the potential duos are apparent enough: two hoofers or, perhaps two book readers or people from the same neighborhood, but nevertheless, a singularity in that they come to find one another as soulmates and worth clinging to, rather than in Romeo and Juliet who are two people fated not to be with one another so that it is perverse to try to make a match.
Moreover, the Rogers women are always feisty, able to manage the Freds and he is required to make a great effort to win over the Ginger, which means that the traditional arrangement whereby men court women remains even in these changes where neither income nor class remain a barrier. Courtship changes but remains the same, as still seems to be he case, boyfriends still bringing flowers to girls even though women may be maling better money and there is no double standard whereby women giving in to men for sex is considered a sacrifice or a sign of devotion. In short, given the economic and cultural changes, it is amazing how steadfast remain the practices of courtship.
Occupation is also a bit of business that can create humor. Penny teaches dance lessons, and is treated as a professional rather than a sleazy profession and Fred is a hoofer and so the two of them quickly find themselves dancing and the owner of the dance studio immediately finds a gig for them at a fancy supper club. Dale Tremont, on the other hand, has an occupation I had never heard of before or since. She wore clothes done by the designer to shw off at fancy establishments so as to make people want to buy the designer’s dresses, and someone suggests that there is something cheap about doing that, and it does seem to be a euphemism for being a woman kept by the designer. The audience is relieved when Dale says that their relationship is purely professional and that the stock Italian who supports her is a self-absorbed fop, who says of himself that he is pretty but willing to marry her when she thinks that Fred is her best friend’s wife, and so is a cad. Actually, the wife is cynical and rules the roost in her marriage, her husband guilty of only one dalliance. It is reminiscent of Wilkie Collins who has the ingenue marry and will supposedly be unhappy at being deflowered by a man she does not love but within a week, she is running the household and the husband is miserable. That too is a joke about who really runs marriages, whether because it is a wish fulfillment and not wanting to face up to how tyrannous husbands can be, and so a reversal of reality, or because it is the truth that D. H. Lawrence posited, which is that men dominated the day but women dominated the night..
Another characteristic that seems to pertain from “Swing Time'' to now is fidelity. Lucky can’t smooch with the girl she loves because he still remains engaged with Francine, who he has promised to reunite when he makes fifty thousand dollars. No two timing even with the girl he clearly cares about. So Penny and Lucky sing and dance to the number “Its a Fine Romance” to recognize that something is wrong with their relationship and aksi ti acjniwkedge that sex us oart if romance, wharever the nusmatch of double standards. Life was complicated in the Thirties and seems similar enough in the present when women decide whether a man is romantic or a lout. So people are free to meet and get together for work, each partner independadant, but the magical tie is sexual fidelity, which again would seem to have gotten suspended by the new freedoms that women now have. In general, the obligations or usages of people tied to one another have loosened in that work and ideas and other matters are suspended as essential to a couple. People have their own incomes and their own interests, and so one might think independent of sexual relations, just like in French aristocracy, where the legitimacy of the heir was the definition of fidelity, not what pasture to graze in. But family or romantic life has centered on just a few things that keep the arrangement distinctive. Couples see one another through sickness and health and sexual fidelity, and the older they get the intimacy is fostered by the spouse or companion becoming the health caretaker rather than shedding that role off to professionals even though there are hospices and adult care takers to taje over the task and do so only because it seems inevitable and practical. In “Top Hat'', Dale Tremont is embarrassed to have her boyfriend see her washing her hair. That is too close and so embarrassing in that the solemnities of becoming a couple have not yet been finished.
When Lucky’s fiance catches up with him, he is relieved to find that she doesn’t want him anymore because she has found someone else. Lucky is relieved and so can pursue his own true love. What he had expected was that there would be a grand scene, something from melodrama or tragedy, whereby the two went asunder. But this is a comedy, which means that things work out, and hard feelings are mostly soared, The reader knows the two will be let out easy, which is contrary to real life, and so the audience assumes that broken romances are stormy if not shattering, and so a way to show what happens in true life.So either by affirming the truth or affirming the suspension of truth, romantic comedy tells the truth, and that is the case in the corpus of the work, far more accurate than what is to be found in surveys and interviews where people are reluctant to reveal or know their true feelings or likely to lie about them. Fiction is the only technique I know of to get at the truth.
“Follow the Fleet” does not seem as not at all enlightened as those other two films mentioned, perhaps because they are adapted from a French novel that have a much crasser take on the relation between men and women, but which seems to me to complement the period of the time, recognizing the difficult conditions that a romantic relation between men and women have to confront. Right off, the situation leaves women at a disadvantage. Men, especially sailors, are louts. They have a girl in every port and are quick to pick fights, all these unattached people far removed from the family men who are presented today as the way military and naval people manage their lives: long deployments, women who are wives who manage their cramped quarters and meagre outlays while the men are away. Rather, the sailors like their free lives. They want to pursue women but not settle down. They want casual sex based on looks while the girls want to find a man who finds them attractive to the point of being willing to settle down. These facts of life are made cruelly apparent. Harriet Hilliard (ten years latter the Harriet of “Ozzie and Harriet”) steals the dramatic role from Ginger Rogers by playing a prim and unattractive schoolteacher, the people least likely to get invited by a sailor for a dance or a flirtation because it won’t result in sex, is transformed by changing her dress, getting rid of her glasses, and having her hair rearranged. It isn’t that she is offended by how men had behaved with her before her transformation. She is pleased by it because attracting men is the only thing really worth doing. So after her boyfriend is off on a cruise and expects her to come home to her when he first comes back to port, she makes a fancy dinner and waits for jhim, but he has ditched her so as to go off with a sophisticated and pliable rich lady. Such is the way of men and women.
There are contrivances whereby the two are reunited. Fred arranges to make it seem that the fancy lady was two timing her with Fred. There is a show put on to redeem harriet’s old dilapidated ship so that she can go sailing around the world with her boyfriend as married with her and travelling with him as captain, a really outlandish proposal just to show that however difficult to imagine, there can be a way by which a sailor and a respectable lady can settle down. In fact, the culmination of the Fred and Ginger on-again, 0ff again relationship is summed up in the last number of the movie, the showstopper, “Face the Music and Dance”, where the dancing shows they are both romantic and paired and cooperative, while partners in the dance, the expression of how romance overcomes social difficulties. No worrying about what happens next, just as no worry about what happens when in “Pretty Woman” the rich and cultivated Richard Gere might get infatuated with the charming but limited hooker played by Julia Roberts . It is only a movie, which means that it is not a slice of life that goes back to when Ophelia was a child of the man who was a key advisor and might have looked up to Hamlet, the son of the King, nor into the future when Denmark has been taken over by Fortinbras and what would happen then, but instead all that there is, just the limits of the pages of the book rather than the story that is drawn from the endless story. The end of the film is the end of the film because the conventions of story make it so, nothing added or extrapolated, just finished.
So how does the bitter and baleful condition of romance in “Follow the Fleet” become accommodated with the more enlightened view of the two other films of Astaire and Rogers cited? Partly because the themes are the same. The Edward Everett Horton figure in “Swingtime” is the lout, even if a pipsqueak sort of one whom his wife imagines as best he can and Rogers is finding himself fallen for a guy who she thinks is a lout because who else is there to find. And because women just do fall for men who don’t deserve it. “Swingtime” has a lighter touch, but a very canny consideration of the relation of thesexes. And, second, each kind of romantic comedy provides the context for the other. Women are suspicious of men, whatever may be in their female hearts, and so are wary of entanglements unless some token of fidelity or good faith is offered, while men will stray if they can because that is in their natures. I am not at all sure that the main things have changed in romance since even if there are no double standards and women can earn their own living, thank you, and pursue their own careers. Somehow, women prevail as being the decent sorts while men are up to skullduggery, as happens in the Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Aniston take in “The Morning Show” about how men, more subtly, are out to take advantage rather than to declare true love. ‘Tis a wonderment that male female relations are so stable over the course of ninety years.