‘You’ll Never Get Rich’ or — (Im)Propaganda?

I was deeply concerned settling down to watch ‘You’ll Never Get Rich’ (1941) last night that I wouldn’t be able to resist comparing it to ‘Top Hat’ (1935), a film I not only consider to be one of the greatest musicals ever made but one that contains my favourite musical number of all time — the transcendentally ecstatic ‘The Piccolino’. So, obviously, I was terrified ‘You’ll Never Get Rich’ would be a major let-down in comparison.

Well, I needn’t have worried, folks, because ‘You’ll Never Get Rich’ isn’t a major let-down compared to ‘Top Hat’ in the slightest. Not at all, because it manages to be a major bloody let-down all by itself with absolutely no help from me. How can something so light, fluffy and inoffensive be so incredibly annoying and dull?

Maybe the problem is the plot which is simultaneously unbelievable and idiotic: Rita Hayworth is madly in love with Fred Astaire, for some unfathomable reason, yet this freaks Fred Astaire out because, as everybody knows, there’s nothing more horrible in life than having someone like Rita Hayworth madly in love with you, so Fred Astaire runs off and joins the army after which the film descends into an unfunny episode of ‘M.A.S.H.’. And that’s it!

“But Colin!” I hear you cry, “Surely there’s all those wonderful Cole Porter songs and dazzling dance routines to enjoy?” Of course there are, but I can’t remember a single bloody one of them. There was a berserk number at the end about a giant cake that’s also a Sherman tank or vice versa but, apart from that, the melodies left an imprint on my memory so fleeting that the unit of time of their existence could only be measured using the Large Hadron Collider.

Or maybe the problem was that monotonous Columbia lighting which, compared to RKO’s inky blacks and searing whites, looked so uniform I started wondering if it hadn’t been conscripted into the army along with the human characters. It gives everything an almost bland TV appearance whereas ‘Top Hat’s lighting is so striking, so dense and so abyssal in nature that Astaire and Rogers seem to have danced their way from out of the depths of interstellar space.

Or maybe the problem is all that military propaganda which pushes its way in between Hayworth and Astaire like an attention seeking puppy? This forces erotic love almost completely out of the equation and replaces it with ideological driven violence, and ideological driven violence, outside of Busby Berkeley, doesn’t lend itself well to the musical format (why do you think the IRA or Al-Qaeda have never had a smash-hit on Broadway?). It sublimates, so thus dissipates, the sex… and musicals are about sex.

Not that the movie isn’t without its pleasures: Rita Hayworth wears some gorgeous costumes, the script has some cute lines of dialogue and the dance routines work nicely when consumed as isolated entities. And when Astaire and Hayworth finally do get to perform together they’re great, even if their relationship is so frequently neglected that Hayworth has to furiously compensate by vigorously mooning over Astaire in lieu of any genuinely created chemistry.

Still, I have to remember that this was made by a nation gearing up to ship its citizens overseas to engage in a looming war although, quite frankly, I’d rather have been sent off to fight the Nazis than stay at home and watch any more of this shit.