Movie |
Husband And Wife Act | Dancing
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Best Classic DVD | 2006
Budget 1,196,000 USD
Box Office Collection 1,825,000 USD
Irene Castle served as a technical advisor for the film. According to Ginger Rogers, Castle disliked every costume that she wore and deemed them to be anachronistic. Due to censorship restrictions, Rogers' costumes evoked late 1930s fashions rather than the more daring styles of Castle's 1910s era. When Rogers refused to cut her hair to portray the bob hairstyle that Irene had popularized, Castle became even more displeased. The studio silenced Castle's protests with an additional payment of $5,000.
The ninth of ten dancing partnership films of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers and their last musical for RKO Studios, and their only film based on a true story.
Irene Castle criticized the casting of white actor Walter Brennan to portray her life-long companion and manservant Walter Ash, who was black. She also noted that she and Vernon Castle always toured with a black orchestra, James Reese Europe's Society Orchestra, not a white band. Studio executives overruled Castle's protests in order for the film to play in theaters throughout the southern United States. Due to the film's factual errors and conservative depiction of the era, Castle disowned the film.
Censorship restrictions undermined the film's period authenticity and historical accuracy. Following the rigid enforcement of the Hays Code in 1934, censor Joseph Breen refused to allow any historically accurate portrayal of the Ragtime Era or the early Jazz Age with its bra-less flappers, rakish menswear, libertine sexuality, and copious drinking.
The character of Maggie Sutton (played by Edna May Oliver) was based upon the Castles' openly lesbian manager, Elisabeth Marbury. She was the longtime companion and lover of gay socialite Elsie de Wolfe, more famously known as Lady Mendl. Due to the post-1934 Hays Code's rigid ban regarding on-screen homosexuality, the film omits Marbury's strident lesbianism and transforms her into an asexual matron.
"Irene Castle: I thought you could be a first dancer, a very beautiful first dancer because you are a beautiful dancer but you're so smug and conceited that you can't see any further than your funny nose!"
"Walter: Dances like a sunbeam."
