If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

Good movie but grossly overrated

best movie i've ever seen.

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

. . . but Fred Astaire goes Jimmy one better by playing a shameless DEARSTALKER in this two-hit musical, THE GAY DIV0RCEE. Though "The Continental" is primarily notable for being a tune in the tradition of Glenn Miller's "In the Mood" (that is, a song that NEVER ends: "The Continental" drags on in one form or another for nearly 17 minutes!), as well as for winning the first-ever "Best Song" Oscar (apparently more Academy members ran marathons back then), Cole Porter's "Night and Day" steals "The Continental's" thunder. Beyond these two musical numbers, the next most remarkable ditty in this sex farce involves lyrics encouraging folks to Bump Uglies or Knock Knees or something. Though the movie studio RKO is desperately trying to ape Warner Bros.' Busby Berkeley in their geometric "Continental" chorus line groupings, this only serves to dilute the Oomph which Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers would otherwise provide to it. During the early going of DIV0RCEE, Freddy is nearly as creepy stalking Ginger as his ROYAL WEDDING character is in pursuing a Real Life sister, and likely could give Mr. Krueger a run for his money if they had a Creep-Out Race on ELM STREET.

I had a period in which I was infatuated with the greatness that is Fred Astaire & Ginger Rodgers. Prior to this I often heard of them but I was occupied with later film musical of the 50's. When I checked them out for myself I got it, oh boy did I get it. When together dancing or not, Fred and Ginger are in a world of their own and everyone else ceases to exist. Just look as Night & Day (my favourite Astaire and Rodger's number), what could be more spellbinding? The Gay Divorcée is my favourite Astaire & Rodgers picture. This was their first film together as lead and yet a feel it gets everything right and I consider it a much better film than Top Hat which itself I find overrated.I find the humour of The Gay Divorcée is more creative than that of Top Hat. Take the sequence in which Astaire finds Rodger in London by near impossible luck, then the two engage in a car chase into the country side (how often do you get a car chase in a 30's musical), and then in a wacky races type moment he goes ahead or Rodgers and gets road closed sign out of nowhere in order to stop her. Astaire's stalker attitude could come off as creepy but he is charming enough to get away with it, making this moments morbidly funny. This whole sequence is so surreal and plays like a live action cartoon, as if the filmmakers are making fun of the film's own highly improbably mistaken identity plot. This is much more clever than the handling of the mistaken identity plot in Top Hat. I don't mean to completely undo Top Hat, I think it's a good movie, just whatever Top Hat did I can't help but feel The Gay Divorcée did much better. I've always championed Astaire's unsung abilities as a comedian. His timing and line delivery is easily on par with the likes of Cary Grant; I wish he could have appeared in some non musical comedies. Ginger Rodgers usually had a female companion throughout the series and I think Alice Brady is the best of them all with her histrionics; the sound of her voice alone cracks me up. The Gay Divorcée may have slipped through the recently instated production code. If not then it certainty feels like a pre-code film, with sexual tension throughout and an air of scandalousness to the whole thing.Fred and Ginger, they where gods!

" . . . if you can blend the two," Aunt Hortense advises her niece Mimi (Ginger Rogers). Why not be an instant winner of Dancing with the Stars, too? The premise of THE GAY DIV0RCEE is that pro hoofer Guy Holden (Fred Astaire) falls in love with a geologist's estranged\neglected\divorce-minded wife (Mimi). Furthermore, whenever he smiles at her, she can instantly dance backwards upstairs and across furniture by the unexplained magic of his proximity. She's rich enough to drive something that looks like a Dusenberg, and it just takes a few sappy love songs (such as Cole Porter's "Night and Day") to make Mimi fall for Guy's charms. "Best original song" always has been the strangest Oscar Award category, and the first winner from THE GAY DIV0RCEE sets the pattern. This 16-minute, 50-second (!) song--"The Continental"--features a patio full of random night club dancers getting sprinkled with Astaire's fairy dust and suddenly appearing in coordinated show costumes, dancing in formation like something from the mind of that old drill sergeant, Busby Berkeley!

Well, Fred and Ginger were really beautiful together. Try to imagine this: clean, very clean environments with some evocative—artificial— horizons, here a seaside resort, lovers who are destined but fate dredges up all sorts of dreamlike illusion to keep apart, a plot that emphasizes both fate and multilayered worry about hidden selves, the illusion (the worry) conquered with persistent love and expressed with dance.And yet, what a striking thing that it doesn't work like noir, where fate and hidden selves play a similar function; the difference is that the viewer has too much control over the players and plot.Is this why it registers like magic? We trust that all is going to turn out well.. Like Fred's character, we persist with the story because we feel safe and happy that it will all turn up for the better.From this pov, mishap thrown up by the gods is not as in noir the cause of anxious hallucination, but small, glittering bubbles of fate. Of course it is all so sunny, because the protagonist is, and is unafraid to take chances—this infectious radiance colors the world.Top Hat is much more intricate, because you have two characters doubled with several more layers, here just one. This is easier to digest, more fun.