Just Because Music — Fred Astaire singing Irving Berlin’s “We saw the sea”
Bookworm on Jun 10 2010 at 8:56 am | Filed under: Just Because Music
Follow the Fleet (1936) is one of my favorite Fred and Ginger movies. Since I belong to the Navy League, and often post about the wonders of the U.S. Navy, I thought that this wonderfully clever Irving Berlin song might be a fun homage to the sailors:
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5 Responses to “Just Because Music — Fred Astaire singing Irving Berlin’s “We saw the sea””
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Fred Astaire was Irving Berlin’s favorite singer, and Berlin said that he’d rather have Astaire sing his songs than anyone else (and everyone–from Frank Sinatra to Ella Fitzgerald–sang Berlin’s songs). If you haven’t seen it, I recommend the “Great Performances” episode “The Fred Astaire Songbook,” a documentary (hosted by Audrey Hepburn) highlighting the astounding number of standards he introduced, and featuring interviews with his sister, dance director Hermes Pan, and a bunch of other people–now sadly gone–from the golden era of Hollywood.
Geniuses like Astaire and Audrey Hepburn and Irving Berlin and George Gershwin will be remembered centuries after ours in just the same way that Mozart, Beethoven, Shakespeare, and Dickens are remembered today–as exemplars of the human imagination and artistic spirit at their best. Suffice it to say that even a workaday studio product like Follow the Fleet is light years better, and will continue to amuse and touch people, long after the overproduced, spectacle-laden trash that grabs headlines today will be forgotten.
I agree completely — and the Great Performances you mention is one of my favorites.
=SIGH= Audrey Hepburn.
Charles, you’ve really dated yourself there. Are you honestly telling me that you find class and elegance attractive, and are unimpressed by today’s crop of crass, vulgar, botoxed, siliconed, and brain-dead actresses? I’m shocked. It’s people like you….
Don’t knock brain-dead. Easier to pilfer their lines of coke when you distract them.