Call me old-fashioned and I will thank you for the compliment. Call me a fool for rosy nostalgia and more thanks will be in order. Yes, Fred and Ginger are my favorite movie couple, and last year while recuperating from a broken leg, I watched four of their movies back-to-back shown on Turner Classic Movies. I haven’t stepped into a movie theater in years, and only watch TCM and a few sports on the idiot box. The latter has recently become even worse after the Trump victory. Watching know-nothing talking heads repeat ad nauseam how Americans turned out to be racists and homophobes, and the fury unleashed by “traumatized” students, is sickening enough. Add to that the utter idiocy of most programs and the terminally adolescent and moronic late-night talk shows, and a black-and-white Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movie from 1935 is like an ice-cold beer at the end of a two-hour walk across the Sahara.
Fred and Ginger flicks transcended the boundaries of identity because today’s marketeers, interested in identities they can target, did not exist. Everyone was white and good-looking, had wonderful and impeccable manners, and dressed more elegantly than the Duke of Windsor, of necktie-knot fame. Mind you, there were black porters on the train and serving on the liners taking Fred and Ginger down South America way, but that was about it. They were called escape flicks for the poor and unemployed. They have now become escape clauses for the permanently traumatized by the atrocious manners of the great unwashed, people like yours truly.
Current Prices on popular forms of Gold Bullion
So you can imagine what a delightful surprise it was to see a movie called La La Land, starring the divine Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling. They might not dance like Fred and Ginger, and they’re not dressed as elegantly, but it’s a bittersweet fairy tale with the couple and others bursting into song à la ’50s musicals. Stone and Gosling are actors first and not dancers, but practice makes perfect and their hoofing is as professional as it gets. Fred and Ginger were the opposite—hoofers first, then actors. Perhaps that’s why I prefer them, their inability to act down-to-earth, or naturally. There’s too much “naturally” nowadays, too much swearing, and much too much information. Give me a fairy tale any day.
