During the week of September 20, 1935, all five Irving Berlin songs from Top
Hat ("Cheek to Cheek," "No Strings," "Isn't This
a Lovely Day?" "Top Hat, White Tie and Tails,"
and "The Piccolino") were featured in the nation's top 15 song hits on
the popular radio show "Your Hit Parade," the first time a single composer
had that many songs on one show. "Cheek to Cheek" set a record for staying
in the top ten for eleven weeks.
Two Irving Berlin songs from Top Hat, "Cheek to Cheek"
and "No Strings (I'm Fancy Free)," were used in Kenneth Branagh's musical
version of Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost (2000).
"Cheek to Cheek" (sung by Fred Astaire) was also featured in The
English Patient (1996) and in The Green Mile (1999).
"Top Hat, White Tie and Tails" (as performed by Astaire)
was featured in Billy Elliot (2000).
The title was spoofed in the comic short Top Flat (1935), with Thelma Todd and Patsy Kelly.
Some of the film's dance numbers were spoofed in other releases around the same
time. Near the beginning of the movie, Astaire awakens a furious Rogers by dancing
loudly around the hotel room above hers. After she complains and returns to her
bed, he lulls her to sleep with a soft-shoe on sand. Buster Keaton parodied this
in his comic short Grand Slam Opera (1936). He tap dances over
furniture, even the mantel, of his seedy rooming house accommodations waking the
woman in the room below. When she complains, he lulls her to sleep by dancing on
the spilled fillings of a fire bucket (minus a chewed-up cigar). The gazebo dance
to "Isn't This a Lovely Day (To Be Caught in the Rain)" is also referenced
in Broadway Melody of 1938 (1937). Eleanor Powell and George
Murphy dance on a covered bandwagon to escape a rainstorm, but at the end they
leave their shelter and frolic in puddles.
by Rob Nixon
Pop Culture 101: TOP HAT
by Rob Nixon | May 03, 2006

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