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Brattle Theatre puts spotlight on Ginger Rogers

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December 24, 2011|By Gerald Peary

As a Hollywood dance team, Fred Astaire had the class, Ginger Rogers had…

Ginger Rogers loved to have guests over, and she would often ask them to choose among her films for an evening’s entertainment. She would have approved of the nine marvelous picks in the Brattle Theatre’s centennial celebration of the actress, “Backwards & in High Heels: A Tribute to Ginger Rogers,’’ running tomorrow through Dec. 30. The centerpiece of programming is six classic musicals that demonstrate her evolving dancing prowess, from scene-stealing chorine at Warner Bros. in Busby Berkeley’s packed-with-hoofers extravaganzas (“42nd Street,’’ “Gold Diggers of 1933’’) to empyrean RKO star gliding across the mammoth sound stage for duets with Fred Astaire (“Top Hat,’’ “Shall We Dance,’’ “The Gay Divorcee,’’ “Swing Time’’).

The Brattle also provides a fine backstage melodrama (“Stage Door’’) and two delicious screwball comedies (“The Major and the Minor,’’ “Monkey Business’’), which show us that she was also an accomplished actress. It’s not in this series, but Rogers even won a best actress Oscar for an appealing 1940 soaper, “Kitty Foyle.’’

Rogers was born in 1911 as Virginia Katherine McMath, a poor girl from Independence, Mo., who was abandoned by her father and raised by a single mother obsessed that her daughter triumph on both stage and screen. Her non-musical film persona was that of a blue-collar girl of grit and heart, smart on her heels, who is alert to the ploys of dubious men, and who is doggedly ambitious for a female without pedigrees or education. On the Hollywood screen of the 1930s and ’40s, Rogers’s virtues were royally rewarded. Wrote critic Arlene Croce: “The classic Ginger Rogers character was formed by a marriage of screwball comedy and fairy tales. She was . . . the working-class princess with the millionaire waiting at the church.’’

Or elegant, tuxedoed Fred Astaire enveloping her waist on the dance floor.

“He gave her class, she gave him sex,’’ was a statement floating about the studios, attributed to Katharine Hepburn. Alone, Astaire was a thin, pale, asexual dandy. Coupled with Rogers? Astaire circling his agile, compliant, and younger, female dance partner provided an alchemic formula for heat and sensuality. At the Brattle, check out these heart-thumping Fred-and-Ginger numbers: “Cheek to Cheek’’ in “Top Hat,’’ “The Continental’’ in “The Gay Divorcee,’’ and “A Fine Romance’’ in “Swing Time.’’

Dance as transcendence. Their little Zen secret?