Second Chorus (1940)
(On TV, February 2021) The more I dig into Fred Astaire’s filmography, the more I understand why some of his movies aren’t as popular as other ones. While Astaire himself is never less than funny and amazing, the rest of the movies can’t always claim as much. Second Chorus still gets some airplay these days, but one suspects that its status as a public domain film has much to do with the circulation of its low-quality prints. It’s also a film that curiously de-emphasizes Astaire’s skills as a dancer. Instead, the premise has us believing in Astaire (then forty-one) as a twentysomething trumpeter who voluntarily flunks his courses in order to remain with the college band. His friendly competition with another trumpeter kicks into high gear when they meet a young woman and convince her to work for them as a manager, in turn causing no less than bandleader Artie Shaw to recruit her. The rest are comic shenanigans occasionally making good use of Astaire’s skills — most notably in a duet with co-star Paulette Goddard and a climactic number in which tap-dancing is combined with orchestra conducting. More of a band movie than an Astaire movie (especially thanks to Artie Shaw’s contribution), Second Chorus is pleasant to watch but hardly in Astaire’s top half. Goddard herself is far from being the best dancer Astaire’s been paired with (although she does quite well in their sole duet, the one-shot “I Ain’t Hep to That Step but I’ll Dig It”), but she’s among the cutest. Astaire does get a few more good comic scenes — including “Kamarinskaya,” in which he dresses up as a Russian for some step-dancing — but there’s a sense that Second Chorus wastes the considerable talent he brings to it. The result is fine, but just fine: there’s little in the way of pyrotechnics that he brought even to his most average efforts. But that’s what I get for watching Astaire movies in rough descending order of popularity.
