Please enjoy Rogers and Astaire in the stupendous "I Won't Dance" Finale from ROBERTA (1935), restored in High Def, with an encore in slow motion!

Fred Astaire was brought to Hollywood in 1933 to dance with Joan Crawford in Dancing Lady, then moved from MGM to RKO where he was rather casually paired with Ginger Rogers for the first time in Flying Down to Rio. Their one shared dance in that 1933 pre-Code film, The Carioca, gave them no more than a few minutes together on screen, and even made it appear that the fledgling pair was having trouble keeping up with the salacious native dancers, clunking their heads together at one unfunny juncture. While Astaire's solos in Rio are jacknife sharp, it is clear that insufficient rehearsal time was allotted for Ginger to achieve perfection in the Carioca, with Joan Crawford having experienced the same handicap, plus a broken ankle, during the filming of Dancing Lady.

After Rio, fortunately, Fred gained sufficient control at RKO to ensure that weeks of exhaustive rehearsals preceded the actual filming of all his subsequent movies. As a consequence, one of the greatest thrills audiences have ever experienced occurred between 1933 and 1935: Ginger Rogers caught up with Fred Astaire. Watching their pairings in sequence--Rio, The Gay Divorcee, Roberta, and finally Top Hat, Rogers' growth in precision and increasing ability to perform with abandon are a stunning tribute to her talent and perseverence. Her exhilaration and obvious pleasure in more than keeping up with Fred told audiences what they already knew--this pair could top any dancing that had ever been seen before. By the time Roberta was filmed Astaire and Rogers were also topping themselves, and bringing something joyously unexpected to a depression-weary world.

Top Hat, the biggest grossing movie of 1935, was the culmination of that magical process. Subsequent Astaire-Rogers films continued to display their technical growth as a team, but without the freshness and feeling of surprise for audiences. As wonderful as Top Hat is, however, it is apparent that audiences stormed Top Hat because of what they had witnessed in Roberta a few months previously. The Astaire-Rogers numbers in Roberta--I'll Be Hard to Handle, Smoke Gets In Your Eyes, Lovely to Look At, and I Won't Dance--went so far beyond the Gay Divorcee that audiences recognized that there was no point speculating what might follow next.

The finale of Roberta, a duet reprise of "I Won't Dance" lasting only 50 seconds, was the coup de grace, a kind of superhuman release of residual energy that culminates in the pair wrapping around each other in a jubilant hug: mission accomplished! And that was it for several months. With no Tivo or Blu-ray players in 1935, there was no way to replay that minute while the world awaited the next Astaire-Rogers outing--could it possibly have been as magical as it seemed? The answer is Yes. From the 2012 world of infinite replays, the "I Won't Dance" duet is endlessly fascinating to watch at any playback speed, a tribute to two supreme artists charting a course that the world had not previously imagined possible.

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