Actors - Daddy Long Legs

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	Actors - Daddy Long Legs

Daddy Long Legs is a 1955 Hollywood musical comedy film set in France and stars Fred Astaire, Leslie Caron, Fred Clark and Thelma Ritter, with music and lyrics by Johnny Mercer. The film was directed by Jean Negulesco.

One of Astaire's personal favourites, largely due to the felicities of the script which, for once, directly addresses the complications inherent in a love affair between a young woman and a man thirty years her senior. However, the process of making it was marred by his wife's death from lung cancer. Deeply traumatised, Astaire offered to pay the production expenses already incurred in order to quit the project, but then changed his mind.

The first in a consecutive series of three films set in France, he joins the fashion for French-themed musicals which had been established by ardent Francophile Gene Kelly with An American In Paris (1951), and which had also featured Kelly's protege Caron.

Key songs/dance routines:

His first film in Cinemascope widescreen - which he was to parody later in the Stereophonic Sound number from Silk Stockings
(1957) - provided him the opportunity to explore the additional space available, with the help of his assistant choreographer Dave Robel. Roland Petit designed the much-maligned Nightmare Ballet number. As usual, Astaire adapts his choreography to the particular talents of his female partner, in this case ballet. Even so, Caron ran into some problems in this her last dance musical, to the extent that Astaire mentions in his biography that "one day at rehearsals I asked her to listen extra carefully to the music, so as to keep in time". Caron herself puts this down to flaws in her early musical training. The final result, however, has a pleasing and appropriate dreamlike quality. In this respect, it is a more successful attempt to integrate ballet into his dance routines than his previous effort in Shall We Dance (1937).

The History Of The Beat: An Astaire song and dance solo using drumsticks performed in an office environment. While the use of drumsticks recalls the Nice Work If You Can Get It routine from A Damsel In Distress
(1937), and the Drum Crazy number from Easter Parade
(1948), it is a pale shadow of either, and, given that this was the first number to be filmed, some commentators have speculated that it was affected by Astaire's grief at his wife's death.

Daddy Long Legs: An off-screen female chorus sing this attractive number while Caron muses fondly at a blackboard cartoon sketch of Astaire.

Daydream Sequence: Astaire appears in three guises: A Texan, an international playboy, and a guardian angel based on images of him described in letters from Caron. As a Texan he performs a comic gallumphing square dance routine to a short song dubbed for him by Thurl Ravenscroft - the only time in his career that Astaire's voice was dubbed. As an international playboy he tangoes his way through a flock of women, one of whom is Barrie Chase - who was later to be his dance partner in all of his television specials from 1958-1968. The third routine is a particularly attractive and gentle romantic partnered dance with Caron, where she performs graceful ballet steps while Astaire glides admiringly around her.

The Sluefoot: A boisterous and joyous partnered dance with Astaire and Caron with a lot of sharp leg movements in which, untypically, Astaire inserts a short and zany solo segment. The chorus join in towards the end.

Something's Gotta Give: Astaire was deeply grateful to his friend Mercer for composing this now famous standard as he felt the film sorely lacked a strong popular song. In the romantic partnered routine which follows Astaire's rendition of the song, he exploits - albeit reluctantly - the wide lateral spaces afforded by the Cinemascope format. While the routine has many attractive qualities and the ending is particularly fine, some commentators have detected a certain stiffness in Caron, especially in her upper body.

Nightmare Ballet: A solo routine for Caron frequently criticised for its rather meaningless content and length (it lasts all of twelve minutes).

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Actors - Daddy Long Legs

Key songs/dance routines:

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