DECADES: Top Hat (1935)

CONTENT WARNING: Discussion of racism, sexual assault, false imprisonment. We’ve got a new name, a new season, and a new series! First up, we talk about our name change with a tagline you may be familiar with. Then, we kick off a new series with a trip through ALL the decades - if the year ends in 5, we’re watching a movie from it! We kick things off with a frothy, zippy, real humdinger of a musical with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers doing their thing. Remarkably, this movie is incredibly wholesome and unproblematic, its most offensive thing being a wacky Italian accent that angered Mussolini - in short, a net benefit. We kick off our Decades Grab Bag with 1935’s Top Hat on Have a Good Movie! You can email us with feedback at [e-mail], or you can connect with us on BlueSky! If you like the podcast, please subscribe, rate and review the show on your favorite podcatcher, and tell your friends. Intro and outro music taken from the Second Movement of Ludwig von Beethoven's 9th Symphony. Licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Hong Kong (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 HK) license. To hear the full performance or get more information, visit the song page at the Internet Archive. Excerpt taken from the main title to the film Top Hat, written and composed by Irving Berlin. Copyright 1935 RKO Pictures, Inc. Excerpts taken from the main title to the film Mildred Pierce, written and composed by Max Steiner. Copyright 1945, 2005 Turner Entertainment Co., Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.