"CHEEK TO CHEEK" (1935)

"Cheek to Cheek" debuted in a blizzard of feathers in the 1935 RKO film Top Hat, starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. In the film, Rogers wore a gown that was covered with ostrich feathers for the "Cheek to Cheek" dance number. Because of the labor required to hand sew each ostrich feather to the dress, Astaire, who normally approved his partner's gowns and suggested modifications as needed during rehearsals, saw it for the first time at the dress rehearsal immediately prior to the shooting of the dance sequence. He was horrified by the way it shed feathers with every dance movement; as he and Rogers danced, feathers flew off the dress, getting into his nose and eyes and covering his black tuxedo and the dance floor. He later recalled, "It was like a chicken attacked by a coyote, I never saw so many feathers in my life."
Hermes Pan, the choreographer for the film, said that Astaire became angry and shouted at Rogers, who had designed the gown in consultation with Bernard Newman, the dress designer for the film. She insisted that it was perfect for the number and demanded that she be permitted to wear it. In her autobiography Ginger, My Story, she related, "I was determined to wear this dress, come hell or high water. And why not? It moved beautifully. Obviously, no one in the cast or crew was willing to take sides, particularly not my side. This was all right with me. I'd had to stand alone before. At least my mother was there to support me in the confrontation with the entire front office, plus Fred Astaire and Mark Sandrich [the film director]." Her perceived intransigence caused dissension on the set, but after another night’s work by a team of seamstresses, the feather problem was largely resolved and the scene was shot the next day. When the rushes were screened, they were fine, but close examination of the film still reveals some loose feathers on the dance floor. The crisis was over, but a few hard feelings lingered. Pan and Astaire serenaded Rogers with a parody of the song:
Feathers - I hate feathers
And I hate them so that I can hardly speak
And I never find the happiness I seek
With those chicken feathers dancing
Cheek to Cheek
A few days later, in an effort to make it up to Rogers, Astaire gave her a small gold feather for her charm bracelet along with a note that said, "Dear Feathers, I love ya! Fred." He did acknowledge that Rogers was right about the gown; the dance sequence became Astaire and Rogers’ most famous romantic duet.
Astaire sang "Cheek to Cheek" to Rogers immediately prior to their dance sequence. On the day when he was rehearsing the song, he wrote a letter to his sister Adele describing it as follows, "A swell tune – sort of different. It’s a cross between "The Last Roundup" and "Night and Day." It has no verse. The chorus runs something like 72 bars. Figure that out." Philip Furia and Michael Lasser in their book America's Songs provide their own description: "Cheek to Cheek" is one of Irving Berlin’s most remarkable songs. Every time you think you have him pinned down, he confounds you by doing something apparently beyond him – but apparently not. Who could predict that the great hustler of Tim Pan Alley tunes would write a song that went on for sixty-four bars rather than the usual thirty-two, and that he would tweak a conventional AABA structure so that it had an extra eight-bar section right before the end. AABA becomes AABBCA, and the penultimate eight bars feel like a little song all their own, characterized by a sense of heightened desire: "Dance with me, I want my arms about you."
Top Hat premiered in August of 1935 with a film score that consisted of four more songs by Irving Berlin, "No Strings, "Isn’t This a Lovely Day?," "Top Hat, White Tie and Tails," and "The Piccolino," in addition to its most famous song, "Cheek to Cheek." Astaire made recordings of all the songs, which were released simultaneously with the film premier. Astaire's recording of "Cheek to Cheek" was an immediate hit and rose to first place in the pop charts and four more versions charted in 1935: Eddy Duchin and His Orchestra (#2), Guy Lombardo and His Royal Canadians (#2), Phil Ohman and His Orchestra (#5), and the Boswell Sisters (#10). All five songs made the Top Ten on the Hit Parade, and "Cheek to Cheek" spent five weeks in first place. "Top Hat, White Tie and Tails" became Astaire’s signature tune. Top Hat was the fourth film to feature the Astaire-Rogers team and many regard it to be their quintessential partnership. It grossed $3 million in box office revenues in 1935, second worldwide that year only to MGM’s Mutiny on the Bounty with Clark Gable, and was RKO’s highest grossing film for the 1930s. The film score for Top Hat was the first that Irving Berlin wrote for an Astaire film and it demonstrated how well Berlin could write songs that developed character and advanced the plot. It also marked the beginning of a lifelong friendship with Astaire in which Berlin contributed to five more Astaire films. He claimed that Astaire inspired him and that he never would have written the Top Hat score without him.
In his film review at www.rogerebert.suntimes.com, critic Roger Ebert describes Top Hat as having an "Idiot Plot" and, though made in the middle of the Depression, features characters that are ridiculously rich, where even their butlers are gentlemen of leisure. So why did audiences then, and still do now, happily play along? Ebert answers, "Because we are human, because we are bound by gravity and the limitations of our bodies, because we live in a world where the news is often bad and the prospects disturbing, there is a need for another world somewhere, a world where Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers live. Where everyone is a millionaire and hotel suites are the size of ballrooms and everything is creased, combed, brushed, shined, polished, powdered and expensive. Where you seem to find the happiness you seek, when you're out together dancing cheek to cheek."