Books in Brief: The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Book

The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Book, by Arlene Croce (Outerbridge, 191 pp., $9.95). Fred and Ginger puzzle. Objectively, their movies are sheer twilp— yet even as we are about to give up in despair, they begin to dance and—hold it! —we are riveted, moved. They weren’t the greatest dancers of their day; still . . . they were the greatest dancers-together. Miss Croce has devoted more time and attention to Them than most of us have to spare. Her loving appreciation sparkles with insights: Other dance musicals were story films with dances; Astaire’s and Rogers’ were dance films with stories, in which the dances are something special and apart. She evokes (so that we may know what to look for next time) “their smooth, informal, light objectivity,” and describes how in their films “dancing was transformed into a vehicle of serious emotion between a man and a woman.” What gets to us, I suppose, is that Astaire and Rogers were lovers “whose love scenes were their dances.” Complete details of all the productions; lots of pictures and, in the corners of the pages, photo sequences that, when flipped through rapidly, bring Astaire and Rogers to life.