Movies: Ginger Peachy | TIME

Is Ginger Rogers ready for the museum? Well—yes and no. At 55, she is still a star, hoofing and puffing her way through Hello, Dolly! on Broadway at well over $3,000 a week. On the other hand, she has made more films than Cary Grant and has been a star for almost four decades. So it seemed appropriate last week when Manhattan’s Gallery of Modern Art awarded her a “Tribute”—a film festival of her finest hour-and-a-halfs—even though such honors are usually reserved for the likes of Garbo, Chaplin or yesterday’s avant-garde directors. Ginger Rogers was happy for the attention, but she was aware of the anachronism. After viewing the mélange, she sighed, “It ain’t really me up there. Just images, lights and shadows. Me’s here.”

Still, those lights and shadows illuminate more than a career. They shed some flickering light on the America of the ’30s and ’40s, when Hollywood had real home-grown stars and made musical comedies with music and comedy.

Cynical/Rabbinical. To watch the twelve features in the series is to watch Hollywood at its brilliant best and its wilted worst. Her earliest appearance is in Office Blues at 19, when, in spit curls and bee-stung lips, she boop-a-doops: “I hate to urge a man/But he acts like a clergyman . . . I’m so cynical/ He’s rabbinical . . .”

As real life gets worse, the movies get better. Europe may be preparing for the holocaust, and depression is corroding America, but in the hermetically sealed universe of the studios, everything is Ginger peachy. Rogers appears dressed entirely in coins, chanting cheerfully, We’re in the Money. In the background, inevitably, preposterously, are the chorines drilled by Busby Berkeley, a choreographer whose work would now be called high camp. In a kaleidoscopic display of bangles and bosoms, they articulate 300 legs in unison, like a spangled centipede. With Fred Astaire, Ginger begins a cycle that lasts 16 years—from Flying Down to Rio to The Barkleys of Broadway. The routine never varies: Astaire’s pumps beating an impassioned rat-a-tattoo on the shiny floor, Rogers’ footwork echoing a moment later in a flippant filigree. It is the era when dancing still means moving together.

Tomatoes/Potatoes. In her house the walls, telephones and pianos are always white, the butler is always comic, and her escort perennially in top hat and tails, ready for a twirl. Love is the only problem she knows, and that is a somewhat half-witted affair, its contretemps based on misunderstandings that a TV-trained three-year-old could settle in seconds. The battle of the sexes is either mock or bittersweet; one lyric says it all: “We should be like a couple of hot tomatoes/But you’re as cold as yesterday’s mashed potatoes.” All this is sexy only by insinuendo—and thus stimulates the imagination more than crasser treatment can.

Only a handful of the festival films are nonmusicals, but they too are strictly Celluloid City. In Kitty Foyle, Ginger’s apotheosis of the gallant American White Collar Girl won her an Oscar. In Magnificent Doll, she plays Dolley Madison. Forced into a role that is above her head and a script that is beneath her, she utters Dolley’s immortal words to the jailed traitor Aaron Burr (David Niven): “I hope all this will make you think, Aaron.”

After all those years, all those husbands (five) and all that money (more than $1,000,000), the spit has gone out of Ginger’s curls but not out of her polish. Her legs are still lyrical, and her Dolly is a delight. What with a young Ginger on museum display and an older Ginger cavorting onstage, Rogers is the only showgirl in town who can boast of giving her audiences a true déjdà view.

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