Film Review: Follow the Fleet (1936)
Hollywood tends to be risk-averse, but even in its Classic period, studios occasionally experimented with successful formulas. That included musicals starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, which brought escapist fun to impoverished Depression-era masses by portraying a magical and unattainable upper-class world. Compared with most of them, Follow the Fleet, a 1936 film directed by Mark Sandrich, represents a somewhat unusual trip to a world closer to blue-collar Americans.
The film is based on Shore Leave, a 1922 play by Hubert Osborne, which was previously adapted for the screen twice – as the eponymous 1925 silent film and the 1930 musical Hit the Deck. The plot, which is in this case very loosely based on the play, begins when a squadron of US Navy battleships comes to San Francisco, much to the delight of their crews, who, after months of boredom at sea, are looking forward to some quality time in the big city. One of the crew members is Seaman Bake Baker (played by Astaire), a former professional dancer who visits a nightclub where his former dance partner, Sherry Martin (played by Rogers), works as the main attraction. Bake, who has joined the Navy when Sherry rejected his marriage proposal, hopes to rekindle romance. In the meantime, Bake's best friend, Bilge Smith (played by Randolph Scott), meets Sherry's sister, Connie (played by Harriet Hillard), a teacher, and falls in love with her. Their romance is, however, threatened when Bilge gets seduced by socialite Iris Manning (played by Astrid Alwyn).
Like with most Astaire-Rogers musicals, the plot is rather thin and mostly forgettable, and in this particular case, it could be argued that Astaire and Rogers actually don't play the main characters. That is the role taken by their colleagues, Randolph Scott, who plays a somewhat rakish character similar to the one played in Roberta one year earlier, and Harriet Hilliard, who would, two decades later, as Harriet Nelson, become a star of the popular television sitcom The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. Their romantic subplot is nothing to write home about, although Scott plays the role well, and Hilliard even sings a couple of numbers. Both Astaire and Rogers are, on the other hand, trying new things. Astaire, who has played elegant and suave upper-class dandies, here plays an ordinary seaman forced to frequent low-class dance clubs; he also, for the first time, plays the piano in his films. Rogers is improving her dance skills and even does her first solo tap dance number. Those numbers, with the music written by the legendary Irving Berlin, are, at the end of the day, the main reason why the audience would, then as now, watch this film. There are more songs than usual, but everything is topped with “Let's Face the Music and Dance”, which is used in a brilliantly choreographed scene featuring Astaire and Rogers near the end and which also features Art Deco glamour this film lacked beforehand. Unsurprisingly, this song, originally written for Top Hat, a previous Astaire-Rogers collaboration, was used in its celebrated 2011 stage version. But even in this escapist moment, there is a reminder of real life that isn't going to be as fantastic as Hollywood would like to believe. A verse, “There might be trouble ahead”, could be interpreted as a conscious or subconscious warning about the upcoming war and a reminder that some of the battleships depicted in Follow the Fleet got sunk in Pearl Harbor five years after the film's premiere.
RATING: 6/10 (++)
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