General · EdgepediaSeptember 17, 20266 min read

Top Hat

Top Hat is a 1935 American romantic comedy musical directed by Mark Sandrich for RKO Radio Pictures, starring Fred Astaire as dancer Jerry Travers and Ginger Rogers as fashion model Dale Tremont, with music and lyrics by Irving Berlin. It was the fourth of the nine films Astaire and Rogers made together at RKO in the 1930s and the first written specifically for the pair, and it is widely treated as the film that set the tone for their series and for the Hollywood movie musical of its era.¹^•²^•³

Key fact	Detail
Release	6 September 1935; black-and-white 35mm; running time reported as 99–100 minutes by the AFI Catalog and 105 minutes by Encyclopedia.com¹^•³
Principal cast	Fred Astaire (Jerry Travers), Ginger Rogers (Dale Tremont), Edward Everett Horton (Horace Hardwick), Helen Broderick (Madge Hardwick), Erik Rhodes (Alberto Beddini), Eric Blore (Bates)³
Key crew	Director Mark Sandrich; producer Pandro S. Berman; screenplay Dwight Taylor and Allan Scott; cinematographer David Abel; music and lyrics Irving Berlin; choreography Fred Astaire with Hermes Pan³
Songs	"No Strings," "Isn't This a Lovely Day?," "Cheek to Cheek," "The Piccolino," and "Top Hat, White Tie and Tails," all by Irving Berlin⁴
Academy Awards	Nominated for Best Picture (lost to MGM's Mutiny on the Bounty), Best Art Direction, Best Dance Direction, and Best Song¹
Recognition	Added to the Library of Congress National Film Registry in 1990, its second year; AFI counts it among the greatest musicals and "Cheek to Cheek" among cinema's great songs⁵^•⁶
Budget	Contemporary news items estimated $500,000 to $750,000; modern sources list $620,000 and $650,000¹

Spoilers

Plot

Jerry Travers, an American dancer making his London debut, works for producer Horace Hardwick. Practicing a new routine late one night in Horace's hotel suite, he disturbs the sleep of Dale Tremont in the room below. When she comes upstairs to complain, the two are immediately attracted to each other.⁷ Over the following days, which include a dance under a park gazebo in a heavy downpour, Dale begins to fall for him as well, but a letter from her friend Madge convinces her that the man she has met, whose name she does not know, is really Horace, Madge's husband. Dale leaves for Venice with her Italian dress designer Alberto Beddini, and the romantic complications are resolved only when Horace and Madge straighten out the mistaken identity.²

Production and origins

The screenplay by Dwight Taylor and Allan Scott drew very little from the stage play by Aladar Laszlo and Alexander Faragó, so RKO chose not to give the playwrights screen credit; modern sources state that the only element retained from the play was a bit of action involving Jerry carrying Horace's briefcase. The play had earlier been filmed in Hungary and distributed in the United States in 1934 as Romance in Budapest.¹

A pairing that almost failed. Astaire resisted being part of a team, having spent years partnered on Broadway with his sister Adele, and told his agent Leland Hayward that if he was to get anywhere on screen it would be "as one not as two." Rogers, an ambitious Depression-era actress who had come up from vaudeville, wanted dramatic parts rather than frothy musicals. Producer Pandro S. Berman overrode Astaire's objections, and the studio's financial straits after its 1933 bankruptcy allowed him to offer Astaire a rare incentive: profit points. By the time Top Hat went into preparation, Astaire's contract called for 10 percent of the profits above his salary, and the success of the earlier films had pulled RKO out of debt.²^•⁸ Rogers would not have been paired with Astaire at all if Dorothy Jordan, originally cast in the role, had not dropped out to marry producer Merian C. Cooper.²

By 1935 the pair were established stars, and RKO hired Irving Berlin to write a new score for the Taylor and Scott screenplay.³ Astaire and Berlin met for the first time during the making of the film and formed a close friendship that lasted the rest of their lives; the two went on to make six more films together.⁵ The "Top Hat" number evolved out of a routine from the Broadway show Smiles, in which Astaire had starred; Astaire pitched the idea to Berlin, who then wrote the film's title song.¹

The dances and the music

Astaire did most of the choreography, uncredited, with the assistance of Hermes Pan, and insisted on shooting the dance numbers full-on with a minimum of cuts. At a time when sound synchronization was still imperfect, shooting a dance number in a single take, without segmenting the dancers' bodies, was itself a statement: whole figures navigating real space.²^•⁹

The feathered dress. In his autobiography, Astaire described the trouble caused by Rogers's feathered gown in the "Cheek to Cheek" routine: "Everything went well through the song, but when we did the first movement of the dance, feathers started to fly as if a chicken had been attacked by a coyote."¹⁰ The number became one of the pair's most renowned.¹¹

Berlin's songs varied in origin. "Cheek to Cheek," his longest-ever popular tune at sixty-four bars, was written in one day. "The Piccolino," the big production number closing the film, required as much work as the rest of the score and recalled the music Berlin had composed for Broadway revues in the 1920s; it was written as a song about a dance, with the words "Come to the Casino/And hear them play the Piccolino," in the pattern of earlier Astaire-Rogers production numbers such as "The Carioca" and "The Continental."⁸^•¹²

Reception and legacy

Top Hat was nominated for four Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Art Direction (Van Nest Polglase and Carroll Clark), Best Dance Direction (Hermes Pan, for "The Piccolino" and "Top Hat"), and Best Song ("Cheek to Cheek"). It lost the Best Picture award to MGM's Mutiny on the Bounty, the art direction award to Richard Day, the dance direction award to Dave Gould, and the song award to "Lullaby of Broadway" from Gold Diggers of 1935. The trade paper Film Daily included Top Hat in its list of the ten best pictures of 1935, and by the end of that year Rogers and Astaire ranked as the fourth most popular movie stars in the country in an MPH poll.¹

The film's standing has endured. The New York Daily News called it the best movie musical ever, and Carrie Rickey, writing for the National Society of Film Critics' list of 100 essential films, called Top Hat the most iconic of the Astaire-Rogers films, though not the most rhapsodic (that would be Swing Time) nor the giddiest (Follow the Fleet).⁸^•⁹ On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds a 100% Tomatometer from 42 reviews, with a critics consensus describing it as "a glamorous and enthralling Depression-era diversion."¹³

Later life of the property. The film entered the National Film Registry in 1990.⁵ A stage musical adaptation, built on the film's five Berlin songs with roughly ten more drawn from his repertoire, ran at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris in 2026.¹⁴ The film itself remains available for digital rental and purchase on services such as Amazon Video, Apple TV Store, and Fandango At Home.⁷

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Musical and music films (individual works) › Musical films of the 1930s to 1960s

Initially written Sep 17, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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