That was an excellent one.

Please don't spend money on this.

It is not only a funny movie, but it allows a great amount of joy for anyone who watches it.

The movie is wonderful and true, an act of love in all its contradictions and complexity

I wonder what kind of press campaign THE STORY OF VERNON AND IRENE CASTLE was given back in 1939? Many customers knew the fate of Vernon Castle before they ever entered the theaters, but there's no doubt that many did not (Astaire mentions that his own wife had no idea who Vernon and Irene were). For them the tragic ending may have been something of a shock, even a cheat as advertisements are virtually never downbeat, and such reactions are unlikely to help a film's reputation. The Castle film is so different from the rest of the Rogers/Astaire series that I fear it's continued to be unfairly slated by audiences and critics alike. How is THE STORY OF VERNON AND IRENE CASTLE different? Let us count the ways. We have a new director, H. C. Potter. We have a true story, a biography, to present rather than a fictional bedroom farce or screwball comedy. Consequently, our stars are playing real, non-wisecracking people rather than fictional characters. The Art Deco sets are gone, replaced with historically realistic trappings. Ditto for the costuming. Rather than the brilliant new musical scores to which we've become accustomed, we get a brilliant use of period musical pieces, and the choreography likewise is derivative rather than original. The comedy tends to be gentle and situational rather than verbal and brittle. And most different of all, in the end we're not dealing with comedy, but with a tragedy. When you come to think of it, that's a lot to take in for an unprepared audience.There were many biographies made in Hollywood around this time, and among the musical ones THE STORY OF VERNON AND IRENE CASTLE strikes me as one of the most successful, perhaps even the most successful (I'm not a fan of YANKEE DOODLE DANDY, and most of the rest hardly bear mentioning). We receive a genuine history lesson regarding the popularization of ballroom dancing in America and Europe, and I, for one, was very surprised at the commercialization accompanying the rising fame of these pre-World War One dancers. Not many dancing couples have the acting chops to successfully take on roles that branch out from romantic comedy all the way to tragedy (Kelly and Garland?) but Astaire and Rogers prove well up to the task. And while Fred probably doesn't rise above the level of competent, Ginger has the opportunity to make an actual character journey from gawky but talented teenager to loving and serious young wife. She may have pressed a bit at the beginning to play ten years younger than her actual self but it seems to me that she hit the ball perfectly during the second half of the picture.There's more dancing in VERNON AND IRENE CASTLE than it's usually given credit for. Fred has his usual solo, pleasant but unspectacular, Ginger has a tricky specialty number meant to show her character off as gauche yet talented which she pulls off nicely, there's a lively rehearsal number to 'Waiting for the Robert E. Lee', and there are the various examples of the Castles' dances, with perhaps 'The Maxixe' being outstanding among them. They are all performed brilliantly by Fred and Ginger, and their final waltz, the last dance they did for RKO, gives us one last beautiful image to admire and one final emotional rush to feel. It was a great run.CASTLE provided RKO with approximately the same revenue as had FLYING DOWN TO RIO, but the expenses were now far greater and the film suffered a small net loss. As a result, Astaire was offered a new contract at about half the old salary, but he felt (correctly so) that he could command his old figure on a picture by picture basis with other studios. Such was the un-romantic ending to the famous Astaire/Rogers partnership at RKO. They would both go on to have enormous success separately but are probably destined to always remain best known together. There are worse fates.

Viewers expecting a reprise of some of the great Astaire/Rogers vehicles of the mid-Thirties are likely to be disappointed with H. C. Potter's biopic. This is a low-key retelling of the life of two great ballroom dancers, with the emphasis placed on their life after marriage. There are a few incongruities: Astaire makes no attempt to portray Vernon as an Englishman (who was actually born in Norwich in the east of the country), even though he is shown to be joining the army during the First World War. Their general factotum Walter (Walter Brennan) was in reality an African American, but in Potter's film the role has been transformed into a comic foil for Astaire and Rogers, rather like that of Edward Everett Horton in their musicals earlier on in the decade.The dance-sequences are low-key, but reveal Astaire and Rogers' talent for taking on all types of dance. They glide across the screen like sylphs - as with all of their movies, they ooze style. One wonders why the comic Lew Fields (playing himself in the movie) declined to take them on in his show early on in their careers; and why he believed (quite erroneously) that Vernon was a better comedian than he was a dancer.Director Potter makes considerable use of dissolves, as well as superimposed sequences where the couple are shown rather like phantoms dancing across the screen. This is especially evident at the end, where Irene remembers those wonderful days when the two of them were performing in Paris, just after her husband's unfortunate death in an air crash has been announced. Rogers' performance is especially memorable at this point, as she battles to keep calm, despite her emotional traumas.Astaire seems a little constricted in this film - although he has one or two moments of comic repartee with Brennan, he does not appear especially comfortable in the flying sequences, either in the air or on the ground. It's obvious that he misses his dancing shoes. As other reviewers have remarked, THE STORY OF VERNON AND IRENE CASTLE takes certain liberties with the truth about their biographical subjects' lives. But then perhaps we should see it not as a biopic, but as a deliberate coda to Astaire and Rogers' career at RKO - as the two of them are seen dancing into the distance at the end of the film, we realize that this is the end of an era. Although the two of them were reunited in MGM's THE BARKLEYS OF Broadway a decade later, they could never recapture the magic of their RKO canon.

There was probably a good reason why RKO put these top-rated stars into a vehicle that was alien to everything they had done before; it's interesting to speculate that perhaps the studio felt the franchise was winding down and needed kick-starting in a new direction, or maybe the studio felt the partnership was growing too demanding and wanted to 'teach them a lesson' or, to explore another avenue, maybe they HAD been unable to persuade Astaire to sign another contract and decided his last contractual obligation would be in a movie weighted towards Ginger. Whatever, they came up with a bio-pic of two dancers who had revolutionized ballroom dancing a quarter of a century earlier but were, at the time of filming, virtually forgotten. Unlike the others in the franchise this time around there would be no mistaken identity ploys to keep the couple apart until the last reel, no new score (just a single new number) from the likes of Berling, Kern or Gershwin AND for good measure an unhappy ending.Vernon Castle was an Englishman from Norwich who moved to America and appeared in a dozen or so Broadway shows before forming a dance partnership with his wife, Irene, which brought them fame and fortune. He enlisted soon after the outbreak of World War I and was killed in February, 1918, and the film more or less follows that outline. This time around there is virtually no chasing the girl; they meet and marry within two reels, spend another reel starving then become an overnight sensation, enjoy it for five or six years until Vernon dies in an airplane accident.Fred and Ginger do what they did best, sing and dance but this time in a completely different style to the one fans were used to and expected. Nevertheless they still manage to charm and captivate and actually carry much more of the film with no Eric Blore, Edward Everett Horton, Erik Rhodes or Helen Broderick to share the load. In lieu of these comic stalwarts we get Walter Brennan (playing the part of a man who, in real life, was Black) and Edna May Oliver, both of whom are up to the little they get to do. Apparently it disappointed fans on its initial release but today it stands up well and reminds us just what our grandparents, parents, and even ourselves loved about Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.

The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle is the last of the 9 RKO musicals Astaire did with Rogers. However, from a story point-of-view, it is their best film by a mile. The contest isn't even close, IMO.It's not their best musical. This film is really a drama with a few musical interludes, whereas most of the other Astaire-Rogers films were musical comedies. Those other films had flimsy plots at best and were saved only by their songs and dances. BUT - "Vernon and Irene" could easily stands alone without any songs or dances. It even has some action sequences as is typical of war-time films (WWI, in this case).The film is a bio-pic about the Castles, who in their heyday were even bigger than Astaire and Rogers. The choreography is more attuned to 1910's sensibilities than the usual Astaire and Rogers film, but that's okay. Astaire and Rogers dance just well as always.As the dancing duo's last RKO film, V&C is quite classy and a fine close to a great RKO dancing career for the two.