The Sky’s the Limit (1943)

(On Cable TV, April 2020) You won’t find The Sky’s the Limit ranked very high on any list of Fred Astaire’s films, but fans may find it interesting to see him playing something slightly different than usual. The most distinctive aspect of it is that the film in unabashed wartime propaganda, and that Astaire plays a military pilot! Not a very dutiful one, mind you—he escapes his own morale-boosting tour to go have fun in New York City, meets a girl and the film gets back on the tracks of Astaire’s usual romantic comedies. While the songs and dances are sparser than usual, Astaire’s character is written, as usual, as a persistent stalker when it comes to pursuing girls. To make up for fewer musical numbers, the romance is more front-and-centre than usual, even if the match between Astaire and Joan Leslie (both of them playing characters with their first names) doesn’t quite gel. The film gets better during the pair’s first ta-dancing duet, but eventually the romance hits its usual third-act wall. This temporary break-up leads to the best sequence in the film—and one of the highlights in any serious Astaire anthology: the “One for My Baby (And One More for the Road)” number, in which Astaire’s drunk character lashes out at his frustrations at a hotel bar by tap-dancing and kicking glasses and bottles at the mirrored bar wall. It’s a shocking, violent, and completely off-persona sequence for Astaire at the time, even though it portends Astaire’s wide-ranging post-musical acting career. The film could have ended on that note, but there are still a few minutes for a wholly unsatisfying happy ending that feels trite considering the rest of the film. The Sky’s the Limit is, to be sure, an interesting film for Astaire fans asked to accept him as something else in a film that doesn’t particularly use his talents very well in service of wartime propaganda. But it’s not a particularly good film. For fans only, and even then—steel yourself the moment you see Astaire acting drunk.