I did not want to watch Royal Wedding. I'll get that out of the way up front. I only picked it because it seemed to have the best reputation of any of the movies airing for Peter Lawford (other than maybe It Should Happen to You, which I'd already seen), and because I could tell he had a prominent enough role without being the actual star. I'm not a fan of Peter Lawford. I'm not really a fan of the Rat Pack in general, although I do like Frank Sinatra in most of his solo acting efforts, and even pre-Rat-Pack, I find Lawford extremely unappealing, perpetually smarmy and boozy even when he's straight sober. I also apparently don't find him that memorable, because I didn't remember until just now, looking through a list of his other movies, that he was in the Judy Garland musical Easter Parade, which I watched only last year. (To be fair, I don't remember the plot of that movie, either, so maybe Lawford isn't the one I should blame.)Lawford's costar in Royal Wedding, as in Easter Parade, is Fred Astaire, and the two of them are joined by Jane Powell and Sarah Churchill as their respective love interests. Astaire and Powell are the stars of the film, playing Tom and Ellen Bowen, a brother and sister dance act, which is always doomed to come off a little hinky, I think, no matter what the context -- it's weird on reality TV dancing shows, and it's weird here, especially during the opening number, in which the siblings dance as characters who definitely aren't brother and sister. Anyway, Tom and Ellen travel to England for the wedding of Elizabeth II (hence the title of the film), where Ellen falls in love with an English lord (Lawford) and Astaire falls for a fellow dancer played by Churchill, but also spends a lot of time by himself, which leads to the two most famous moments of the film and, in my opinion, the only two reasons to watch it: the first is Astaire's dance number with a hat rack, the second is his "dancing on the ceiling" number, which the filmmakers achieved by constructing a model of the room inside of a giant steel barrel and slowly rotating it. These two dance numbers, just like most of Astaire's dance numbers, stand the test of time; the rest of the dance numbers in the movie are fine, but, much like the movie itself, nothing terribly special.
Which brings me to something I've noticed about a lot of Fred Astaire's movies, which is that he often dances with women -- including Jane Powell -- who are clearly multitalented but aren't dancers in the sense that he was a dancer, or Gene Kelly was a dancer, or many of the women whom Kelly danced with in his movies (Cyd Charisse, Leslie Caron) were dancers. Astaire is often paired with actresses who learned to dance for their roles opposite him, or for movies and stage work in general; he is rarely paired with women who broke into movies because they were dancers. Even Ginger Rogers, his most frequent (and arguably best) dance partner was an actress first, dancer second, and I think the reason the two of them had so much success was because she moved perfectly with him in all ways, not because she was as skilled of a dancer as he was. Jane Powell does a fine job dancing with him in Royal Wedding, but the thing that sets her apart from other actresses is her singing voice, not her footwork. The reason I mention this is because I think the usual formula for a Fred Astaire movie is "Such-and-such actress dances with Fred Astaire," where dancing is (usually) a form of romantic coupling and he is always leading, always in control; when he dances with a woman whose skills equal his own, the effect is quite different. Take a look at his famous dance with Rogers in Swing Time versus his dance with Eleanor Powell, an experienced tap dancer, in The Broadway Melody of 1940.
Both numbers are great, but they're great for different reasons. I don't know enough about Fred Astaire to know whether he danced with non-dancers more because the studio bosses wanted him to, or because he wanted to, or because that's just how it worked out, but I find the disparity interesting, especially when you consider that skilled female dancers like Powell and Anne Miller never became as big of stars as Astaire or Gene Kelly. (I also think, after watching that Astaire and Powell clip, that Kim Novak might want to write another letter to Variety, because The Artist may have "stolen" more than the Vertigo love theme. Or maybe I've just seen the trailer for The Artist so many times that I'm seeing it everywhere.)
Grade: B-
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