Cinema: Dancing Girl

No. 1 current trend in U. S. cinema is biography. Biographical cinema got off to a good start three years ago when Warner Bros. made The Story of Louis Pasteur, followed it with The Life of Emile Zola. At Twentieth Century-Fox, Darryl Zanuck played up the vogue with such million-dollar footnotes to history as Lloyd's of London, In Old Chicago, Suez, Jesse James and Alexander Graham Bell.

Production schedules for this spring and summer read like headings in an encyclopedia. Every major studio has at least one biography already in production, more on the production line. Under way are Young Mr. Lincoln, Stanley and Livingstone, Beethoven, Man of Conquest (Sam Houston), Man in the Iron Mask, Juarez, Brigham Young, Knute Rockne. Promised for next season are Mme Curie, Thomas Edison, Rudolph Valentino, Steinmetz, Lillian Russell, Simon Bolivar, Nobel. Last week the first spring shoot of this bumper crop appeared on U. S. screens. The biggest job to date of Hollywood's sole socialite director, Henry Codman ("Hank") Potter, it is a $1,500,000 close-up of Irene and Vernon Castle, produced by RKO Radio's Pandro Berman with 1) the advice of one of its biographees, 2) the eminently suitable talent of Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire.

The Castles' career was a preview of subsequent Hollywood story patterns. They literally became famous overnight. It was a night in March 1911, in Paris. There & then, at the Café de Paris, they launched the dancing era by performing to the extraordinary sounds of Too Much Mustard. Within the next five years, the Castles became by far the most celebrated dancing personages of their era. They popularized the Maxixe, the One-Step, the Castle Walk. They opened a chain of four ballrooms and made about $15,000 a week. When Irene Castle bobbed her hair, a million other U. S. women aped her. Vernon Castle enlisted in the Royal Flying Corps in 1916. When he was killed in a crash at Fort Worth, Tex., on Feb. 15, 1918, the Castles' career became a legend, commemorated by a dance craze that is not over yet.

The Castles starts when Vernon (Fred Astaire) is working as stooge in a revue sketch with Lew Fields (Lew Fields). When he meets Irene Foote (Ginger Rogers), daughter of a New Rochelle doctor, he is first horrified by her amateurish version of Bessie McCoy's Yama Yama dance, then by her brash assumption, after watching him cut loose with a few tap steps on the station platform, that the future holds more for him than a putty nose and a wig.

The sensation of the Castles' debut a year later is adroitly prefaced with sequences showing Vernon Castle teaching his new wife his routine and then failing utterly to impress Fields; the genesis of the tip-toe Castle Walk, designed not to disturb the occupants of the Paris apartment below their own; and their meeting with Maggie Sutton (Edna May Oliver), who gets them their first engagement in return for a dinner.