latic

A terrific Arlen/Mercer score and Fred Astaire – what more could you want? A decent movie to put them in. And this is not it.

Astaire's customary brash, self-confident persona here comes across as thoroughly irritating. A stalker who breaks into a girl's flat while she is asleep? Pity she didn't call the cops and save us all from the rest of the film. I can usually excuse the plots of musicals but this one is particularly yawn-making.

Astaire's dancing is, of course, the big compensation and he is on superb form. But I hate the drunk routine that was devised for One for My Baby – the most charmless and unappealing performance I have ever seen from him.

For an actress, Joan Leslie acquits herself surprisingly well as his dancing partner although, if she ever stopped to think about the plot, she might have wondered what she had got into – at just 18, she was being wooed by the 44-year-old Astaire and Robert Benchley who was 54 for heaven's sake (incidentally, I gather Benchley's after-dinner speaker routine was regarded as funny at the time but nowadays, it just brings the movie to a clunking halt).

All in all, a stodgy lack-lustre affair when it could have been so much better.

I thought The Sky's the Limit was the worst musical Astaire ever made until I saw this. This is just dismal. Start with the plot: Astaire is supposed to be a student? He was 40-plus and looked it. Never a conventionally attractive leading man, he got away with it with Ginger but here he just looks his age.

But you could forgive that if there had been any decent dancing which is all you really want from an Astaire movie. Instead, there are just three lack-lustre routines: a brief mock- Cossack dance, a decent tap routine at the end (but nothing he hadn't done far better in other movies) and a routine with Paulette Goddard who simply was not a dancer which shows in both the performance and the limited choreography presumably intended to keep within what she could do (dancing apart, she is probably the best thing in the film, beautiful and sparkling).

In addition, what songs there are, by Artie Shaw and Johnny Mercer, are below par. Even the best one, Love of my Life, is pretty mundane. Shaw's band makes up for this with some good numbers and Shaw unexpectedly turns out to be a respectable enough actor, albeit in some undemanding scenes.

But I can't help wondering if it was the presence of Shaw who wrote the score that resulted in the limited amount of Astaire routines – the big band numbers may not have left enough time for dances. Although cuts in the grating plot and unfunny dialogue could have cleared a load of space.

Astaire did not make many duds but this is one of them.

After an excellent start with the train ambush, the movie loses steam and never really picks up, an unhappy way for a great director like Hawks to bow out. But I did not get too bored and was happy enough to stick it out to the end, even though the writing is too flat and derivative with echos of half a dozen better movies. Rivero lacks the charisma that could have helped to save things but I do not think O'Neill is as bad as some reviewers claim – not expressive enough with her dialogue at this stage but I think you can see the spark that gave her a respectable career in movies. But, as usual, Wayne saves the day. Even in a disappointing movie like this, that enormous screen presence reminds you just what a great star he was.