It started on Broadway as the musical “Gay Divorce” in 1932 and featured the one song, “Night and Day,” that would survive in the 1934 movie. The show would be Fred Astaire’s last Broadway appearance, and it marked the only time that he didn’t dance with his sister Adele of the great vaudeville act.
After Fred appeared with Ginger Rogers in “Flying Down to Rio” in 1933, Pandro Berman of RKO conceived a series of movie musicals, each written by a composer of the Great American Songbook. This was the first of those efforts, and Berman went straight to Broadway and Cole Porter. The Hays Office, recently placed in charge of movie censorship, balked at the title because it implied backsliding that could lead to unmarried – or in this case, previously married – people having sex outside the scared institution of marriage. Berman changed the title to “The Gay Divorcee,” thus implying that only one partner might be tempted to backslide. The 1934 movie was nominated for Best Picture, Art Direction, Music Scoring and Sound recording.
This was to become the definitive song of the Great American Songbook. The clip uses the entire intro that Cole wrote. What Fred and Ginger do at the end of the song is one of the great seductive dances of American cinema. How much we’ve lost in 80 years!