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Swing Time

Director: George Stevens
Year: 1936
Run-time: 1 hr 43 min

- Swing Time is the second Astaire-Rogers musical on this list, and I agree with the general consensus that it has better dancing than Top Hat but is a worse story and comedy overall.  The plot makes no sense, more or less, and as in the last film I spend most of the time in awe of the characters' clothes.

- Like the last film, this is such a great quarantine feel-good film that I hate to report that it gets thrown off the rails by a blackface minstrel scene.  It's entirely believable that Astaire was really trying to honor his black tap dance mentor with this one, but nevertheless it's really hard to watch (and is thankfully only the second time that blackface has appeared on the list - after Moulin Rouge - it was extremely prevalent in the era.

- It's bizarre to imagine that this is the sixth film starring Astaire and Rogers and even the second of 1936, so it's easy to imagine that audiences were getting a little tired of the duo, as Wikipedia reports.  There is no contemporary analogy for a pair of actors that people were content to see fall in love over and over again like this one.
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