Top Hat

At the Tremont and the Old South

With Fred Astaire reputedly dancing for the last time in "Blue Skies," it is particularly pleasant to have one of the middle-thirties vintage of Astaire musicals in town displaying his terpsichorean felicity and his personal case of manner at their characteristic best. That "Top Hat" bases a mounting series of un-excruciating events on a carefully mistaken identity and calls it a story matters little. Astaire and Ginger Rogers are on a Boston screen, and they sing Irving Berlin songs and dance to them, and there isn't slightest him of a neurosis or psychoanalyst in the whole picture.

The Berlin songs are among his best. Although "Dancing Cheek to Cheek" has lasted longest in the popular car, "What A Lovely Day To Get Caught In the Rain" zips along and bounces in up-to-date style, and "Top Hat" itself makes most current production numbers look like minor-leaguers.

As for such miscellaneous ingredients as plot and cast, the former is slight and the latter is slick. Full of such odd characters as a valet recruited from the Salvation Army who refers to himself as "we" and a typical Edward Everett Horton queer played by Edward Everett Horton, the picture supplies at least a token of filler between the main-event Rogers Astaire routines.