“Royal Wedding,” which I discuss in the clip above, is one of the few Fred Astaire movies that doesn’t make me wish it had been directed by Busby Berkeley. Astaire had the clout to dictate the way that his dances were filmed, and his dictates were usually to the detriment of his movies. He famously said, “Either the camera will dance, or I will.” For the most part, it should have been a duet; Astaire made sure that he’s good to watch—and that the movies aren’t. Berkeley’s name is synonymous with his biomorphic geometric dance numbers, but his way of looking at individual or paired dancers was equally distinctive; he used high-angle shots and highly directional lighting to match them with their shadows and to etch their gestures against the floorboards in excitingly graphic patterns, a rising or falling or swooping camera to see them from a variety of distances and angles. Stanley Donen, who directed “Royal Wedding,” must have had special dispensation from Astaire to let the camera leap (as it did in the number, seen here, in which Astaire juggles bowling pins) and to weave Astaire into the dense texture of an elaborate configuration of stage machinery and other dancers. Even when Donen played ball with Astaire and kept the camera in place, the scenery moved thrillingly; the result is the first original view of dance in cinema since Berkeley’s heyday.
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