The Gay Divorcee
Mark Sandrich
This film has no current screenings
RKO capitalized swiftly on Astaire and Rogers’s newly minted boffo box office pairing by teaming them in their first starring vehicle. Set amidst a soundstage vision of European seaside glamor, this Hays Code-testing boudoir farce revolves around Rogers’s machinations to divorce her negligent geologist husband while being wooed by an impetuous Astaire. It’s studded, of course, with transcendent moments of cinematic dance: Astaire kicking up his heels while putzing around his apartment to “Needle in a Haystack”; the epic showstopper “The Continental”; and Fred and Ginger ascending to the heights of romantic sophistication in a dance-floor seduction set to Cole Porter’s “Night and Day.”