Swing Time Dances Well But Has Two Left Feet Otherwise

John "Lucky" Garnett (Fred Astaire) is a dancer with an affinity (read: addiction) to gambling and its that affinity that ends up seeing him entirely forgot about his marriage to Margaret (Betty Furness). Eventually, John remembers that he was supposed to walk Margaret down the aisle and, in a distraught fashion, races to Margaret and her Dad to apologize. Margaret's father gives John a deal: if he can make $25,000 in the next few months, John can regain Margaret's hand in marriage. In order to get all that cash, John hightails it to New York City with his pal Pop (Victor Moore), where he accidentally stumbles into a dancing gig alongside Penny (Ginger Rogers).


Swing Time feels like it should be tailor-made for me since it's both a classic Hollywood musical and a romantic comedy. Conceptually, all it's missing is a pug puppy, Greta Gerwig, Toshiro Mifune and the five lead superheroes in Spider-Verse to make it sound like Douglas Laman: The Movie. So then why did this movie end leaving me colder than Elsa in Connecticut in January? Swing Time is rarely a bad movie but it's also rarely all that involving. It's one of those features best summed up as competent but hardly memorable. Partially this is due to the scarcity of entertaining musical numbers, a statement I'm sure is sacrilege in general discussions of classic movie musicals.

Unfortunately, the assorted tunes in Swing Time rarely dazzled and didn't stick around in my brain after the film was over despite my cranium being capable of even remembering musical numbers from The Toxic Avenger: The Musical. Rarely did the lyrics truly bowl me over, even the most iconic tunes like A Fine Romance, for instance, don't have much in the way of witty wordplay or interestingly written songs. Honestly, the lyrics frequently suffer from the problem that, nowadays, plague many of Pasek & Paul's non-La La Land movie musical songs. That problem being that their lyrics feel overly detached from the scenes and even entire movie they're transpiring in. Watching something like The Wizard of Oz, for instance, you couldn't take those wonderful songs and put them into any movie, they resonate as specifically special to those characters and stories.

Meanwhile, Swing Time's songs, even the likes of A Fine Romance, could be plopped into any movie musical with ease, they're rather generically composed creations whose lack of singular personality hinders this movie musical greatly. At least these predominately forgettable musical numbers frequently get accompanied by dance choreography that turns out to be the most impressive facet of the whole film. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers could dance like nobody's business, no question about it and Swing Time smartly recognizes that fact. This means Swing Time uses their talented dancing for its most impressive sequences that limit the focus of the camera exclusively on just these lead actors dancing around in such an extraordinary fashion, there are, thankfully, no cutaways to supporting characters or other subplots to distract from the dancing spectacle.

Why did there have to be so few dance numbers in this movie?? More of this kind of delightful dancing could have easily helped mitigate the weaker parts of the production. Unfortunately, dancing isn't the only thing Swing Time focuses on. There's plenty of ho-hum comedy scenes that fall flat, whether they're about the relationship between Astaire and Rogers' lead characters or shenanigans centered on Pops. That latter comedy element is really more sad than humorous. This poor fella clearly needs serious help of some kind as he stumbles through the world in a detached daze that the movie just seems to find hysterical for some reason. Why couldn't they cut down on the comically underwhelming Pops segments and just focus more on the dancing, which is Swing Time's strongest suit?

It's hard to imagine anyone really splitting their sides over the Pops digressions, ditto for anyone becoming super invested in the tepid romance between John and Penny. That romance mostly suffers due to both characters lacking any kind of thoroughly interesting personality in the script and neither Astaire nor Rogers are able to bring in enough of an entertaining performance to compensate for that issue. Thinly-written characters would be more than fine if at least their performers brought out an endlessly watchable lead performance but Astrair and Rogers both deliver forgettable work in their respective lead roles, though they both truly come alive during the aforementioned dance sequences. There are so many great classic movie musicals out there, make sure to watch one of those instead of spending your time (no pun intended) on Swing Time.

(Oh, and final sidenote, yes, the Bojangles of Harlem musical number with Fred Astaire performing in blackface is extremely uncomfortable to watch, especially since Astaire keeps the blackface makeup on for a prolonged period of time even after the musical number is finished.)