Shall We Dance (1937) on Netflix
Peter P. Peters dances in Paris billed as Petrov, a temperamental Russian. He falls for the tap star Linda Keene and arranges to meet her, but she is not impressed.
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- Rotten Tomatoes89%
Trailer
Plot summary
Peter P. Peters is an American ballet dancer billed as Petrov, a demanding and temperamental Russian. The ballet company he dances for in Paris is run by Jeffrey Baird, and Baird knows the truth about the Russian image. Peters sees a photograph of the tap dancer Linda Keene and falls in love with her. He arranges a meeting as Petrov, and she is not impressed. The two meet again aboard a ship bound for New York, and Linda warms to him. The tabloid press turns their encounters into a story that the two are married.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Shall We Dance (1937)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- George Gershwin was already suffering from the brain tumor that would kill him while he worked on Shall We Dance; musical director Nathaniel Shilkret and Robert Russell Bennett helped orchestrate some of the numbers.
- Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers revived "They Can't Take That Away From Me" for their 1949 reunion film The Barkleys of Broadway; it was the only time on film that Astaire repeated a song he had performed in an earlier film.
- Apart from two sequences, Hoctor's Ballet and Walking the Dog, the score of Shall We Dance has never been published. A critical edition of the full orchestral score, announced in 2013 with the Gershwin family, the Library of Congress and the University of Michigan, is part of a project that may take 30 to 40 years.
- Ginger Rogers dances a rumba with Pete Theodore in Shall We Dance, choreographed by Hermes Pan; it is her only partnered dance in the ten Astaire-Rogers films that is not with Fred Astaire.
- George Gershwin, famous for blending jazz with classical forms, wrote each scene of Shall We Dance in a different style of dance music, and composed one scene specifically for the ballerina Harriet Hoctor.
