Carefree

Carefree with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.  This is the eighth of ten Astaire-Rogers films and the only one from 1938.  Astaire plays a psychiatrist who attempts to psychoanalyze Rogers to find out why she keeps canceling her wedding to Astaire's best friend, Ralph Bellamy.  Instead she falls in love with Fred, and then he falls in love with her.  I thought Ginger Rogers was hilarious in this film.  She performed a lot of mild physical comedy while she was alternately drugged and hypnotized by Fred Astaire.  There is one scene where she has been commanded to lose her inhibitions.  Loose on the street, she sees a glass truck carrying a large pane of glass and determines to smash it. She paces the truck as it creeps along in traffic, finding and rejecting various objects (her purse, her shoes, a fire hydrant) to throw.  All the while she is winking and waving at the truck driver.  In the end the talks a policeman out of his billy club.

There is also a dream sequence song-and-dance number called "I Used to Be Color Blind" that was supposed to be in Technicolor, but apparently it didn't look so good in the color test so they left it black and white.

There is a small role by Hattie McDaniel playing a character named Hattie, and there is also an appearance by Franklin Pangborn, my favorite archetypal hotel clerk (although he plays a skeet club manager in this one).

Ginger spies the billy club