Cinema: Can Dance a Little

They were all dancers. Cagney propelled himself through space like a bullet or a bull terrier, his torso a few seconds ahead of his legs; anyone without a dancer's equilibrium would have fallen on his face. Fonda was just the opposite: a triumph of convex geometry, his thin body a question mark that ambled at Stepin Fetchit pace toward a girl or a cause.

Hepburn seemed always on the ascendant, scaling the invisible ramp of her own confidence. But it was Fred Astaire who defined screen movement, for the '30s and forever. With athletic nonchalance, he showed moviegoers how the human body could express strength, rapture, elegance, amazing grace.

A half-century of Astaire in the movies has made his achievement seem both ineffable and inevitable. Even today, at 82, Astaire is lithe and healthy as he waltzes through the occasional film role. In his latest, Ghost Story, due out next month, Astaire and three other elderly gents (Melvyn Douglas, John Houseman, Douglas Fairbanks Jr.) swap spooky tales. The oddest might be the one about Fred's rise to stardom. Fifty years ago, it was difficult to spot a potential movie star in a body that photographed small, frail, bewildered. Fred and his sister Adele had danced through hit Broadway shows for a dozen years before Adele's marriage to an English lord, but to a movie mogul their stage success could be attributed to snob appeal and second-balcony myopia. In close-up Fred looked—and, in moments of earthbound repose, acted—like Stan Laurel. Thus the famous pronouncement on Astaire's first screen test:

"Can't act. Can't sing. Balding. Can dance a little." But oh, how he danced! That was evident from Ms second film, Flying Down to Rio (1933), when he was paired with a perky chorine named Ginger Rogers. Between then and 1939 Astaire and Rogers made eight films—and movie history.

It was said of Astaire-Rogers: "He gave her class. She gave him sex." The titles changed—Top Hat, Swing Time, Shall We Dance, Carefree—but their roles were constant.

Fred was nature's nobleman, Ginger the plucky girl who made good by dancing well. It didn't matter that the films' plots were aggressively silly, the dialogue often inane. When the music swelled, and Fred took Ginger by the hand, and she leaned into his body, and the dance began, a more beautiful story was told: of the emotions only motion can convey, of two people's need for transcendence, of the perfect fusion of passion and technique into a delicate, sensual mating dance.

Their greatest number, Never Gonna Dance from Swing Time, is an eight-minute ballet of seduction and parting. The quarreling lovers won't dance; they must dance. Their bodies sway helplessly to the music and then surrender to embrace.

Retreating, touching, whirling across the ballroom floor, they try to fight the magnetism of their love, their shared art. The only way to escape its pull is to play the game to its climax.

And so they glide up a winding staircase and into the spiraling ecstasy of a dozen dizzying pirouettes. Suddenly she is gone. He is alone. The dance is over.