Flying Down to Rio, Thornton Freeland, 1933, 89 min.
The Gay Divorcee, Mark Sandrich, 1934, 107 min.
Flying Down to Rio
2:00 p.m.
Remember the chorus girls dancing on the wings of the airplane? Just the second film for Astaire, this classic is a perfect example of the American musical before he and Ginger Rogers transformed the genre. They appear here together for the first time, in supporting roles behind the gorgeous Dolores del Rio. Made before the Hays Code had fully taken hold, this might be the sexiest of Astaire’s films.
The Gay Divorcee
4:00 p.m.
This film is the first to headline Astaire and Ginger Rogers, whose partnership lit up musical cinema in the 1930s and provided an imaginative escape from Depression-era America. The Gay Divorcee offered a fantasy world where “all the telephones were white, all the butlers comic, and love the only concern,” the New York Times wrote in Rogers’s obituary, and it set a new standard for moviegoers.