The Sky's the Limit

Another of the movies that I watched recently in order to try to free up some space on my DVR was the Fred Astaire vehicle The Sky's the Limit.

Astaire, clearly much too old for his role, plays Fred Atwell. He's been doing his service in World War II flying with the Flying Tigers based with the Republic of China forces in the western part of mainland China which the Japanese did not control. He and his fellow pilots Reginald Fenton (Robert Ryan) and Richard Merlin have done some rather heroic work with the Flying Tigers, and the US military have decided to give them a bit of a theoretical break from normal military service by sending them back to the States and going on a bond tour, in which they're making public appearances and raising support for buying war bonds.

This tour involves Fred and the other guys getting ticker-tape parades and the like, but for Fred, it doesn't give him the one thing he really wants, which is real, no-fooling leave. So while they're taking a train to go from one stop to the next on the bond tour, Fred gets out at the wrong stop, ditches his military uniform, and makes his way east to New York in the hopes of getting that real relaxation.

Fred goes to a nightclub where somehow he's able to get in. There, he finds photographer Joan Manion (Joan Leslie), and immediately falls in love with her. And he's quite forward about trying to pursue her, to the point that he's continually popping up whenever she tries to take a photo. Joan unsurprisingly finds this profoundly annoying. Meanwhile, she has dreams of becoming a real professional photojournalist. She's also got a boss in Phil Harriman (Robert Benchley) who has a romantic interest in Joan, too, although she doesn't feel anything more than friendship for him.

Fred finds the rooming-house where Joan lives, and seeing that there's a room available, takes it for the week before he has to join back up with the bond tour, still out of uniform since he doesn't want Joan to know his real identity lest she start peppering him non-stop with questions about his service, which is precisely what he doesn't want.

Along the way, the two dance together and sing several songs, such as Joan singing the Oscar-nominated "My Shining Hour", while Fred gets to sing "One For My Baby (And One More for the Road)", which would later become a standard. You know that the two of them are going to wind up together in the final reel, of course.

To me, The Sky's the Limit is one of the weaker of the Fred Astaire musicals I've seen. Part of this is a feeling that RKO should have sprung for Technicolor; as things stand the movie looks like is stuck with pre-war production values. But the bigger problem for me was several of the plot elements. One is that Fred is way too pushy, to the point that you hope somebody will smack him for it. But there's also his status as a hero. Harriman, being in publishing, eventually is able to discover Fred's real identity, but since he had been in ticker-tape parades that would presumably have garnered a fair bit of attention, even if they were on the other coast, especially considering Harriman is involved in journalism.

It's not that The Sky's the Limit is a bad movie; it's more that it's decidedly lesser Fred Astaire. There are so many good Fred Astaire musicals, even among movies where he wasn't paired with Ginger Rogers, that this one comes well down the list.