Dancer Lucky Garnett plans to get married to Margaret, but the members of his dance troupe stall him for hours, until he misses his wedding. In order to apologize to Margaret's father who demands a 25,000$ dowry, Lucky and his friend Pop travel to New York to try to earn that sum on gambling. Lucky meets Penny, a dance instructor, and falls in love with her, complicating matters. Penny plans to get married to Ricardo. During a walk on the snow, Pop accidentally spills the secret to Penny that Lucky is engaged. After a dance show, Margaret tells Lucky that she wants to break up the engagement. Lucky then stops Penny's wedding with Ricardo. As Lucky and Penny kiss, Lucky throws away his lucky quarter.
Included in Roger Ebert's Great Movies List, the sixth cooperation of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, "Swing Time" is arguably the best movie of the famed dancing duo, a one whose irresistibly charming dialogues and rom-com situations actually even surpass their usual main attraction, the virtuoso dance sequences. The story is again chaotic and meandering, kitschy and naively carefree, yet its main core of a man and a woman meeting and falling in love even though they are both engaged to someone else is easy to understand, whereas it has a plethora of wonderful jokes, ideas and sweet solutions. The opening is already amusing, when the protagonist Lucky Garnett plans to get married and quit his job in a dance troupe, so his fellow dance companions complain: "How do you like that, letting his marriage interfere with our career?" They thus try to stall Lucky for hours so that he can miss his wedding with Margaret, and thus send his pants to a tailor to put cuffs on them, yet the latter protests: "As long as I'm living—and longer—I've never seen cuffs on pants like these!"
At the same time, the guests are arguing about the wedding: "As I always say, marry in haste, repent at leisure." - "The young man is now 1 hour and 25 minutes late, that isn't exactly marrying in haste." The director George Stevens seems to be more focused and professional than your 'run-of-the-mill' Astaire-Rogers directors in other films, and it shows in the overall cumulative effect. The dance sequences are once again great—including a one where Lucky and Penny dance in the building, and at one point jump over a short fence, or when Lucky is mimicking the dance of a rear projection of three of his giant silhouettes on the big screen behind him—yet one romantic moment is so magical by itself it sends shivers down the spine, and would have formed sufficient reason to see the entire film just for that little slice of perfection, even if all other scenes had failed. It's the one 70 minutes into the film, when Mabel is so fed up with both Lucky and Penny going back and forth, being too shy to finally admit that they love each other, that she dares Penny to go to Lucky's dressing room and give him a big kiss already, if "she has the nerve". Penny responds that she is not afraid and truly goes, knocks on the door, and leans towards Lucky, twice, but he takes a step back, twice. Finally, he realizes what she feels for him, leans closer towards her, as a man opens the door and blocks the view of them—as he looks behind the door, he spots the couple smiling, with Lucky having lipstick on his lips. "Swing Time" plays out like a cozy dream: one gets the impression that the writers and the director danced as elegantly and happily on their field behind the camera as did the two stars in front of it.
Grade:+++
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