"My favorite film is a Fred Astaire film called A Damsel in Distress. It’s without Ginger Rogers, but it’s based on a P.G. Woodhouse book, who is my favorite author of all time, and he wrote the script. And it’s hilarious, and it’s wonderful. Astaire is amazing in it. Joan Fontaine is 22 years old. It’s beautiful, and it’s based on this wonderful Woodhouse book. I watch that at least once a year. And it’s got Burns and Allen, and they’re hilarious. It’s a great film."

"Mark Sandrich was the superlative director of Fred Astaire musicals, strikingly more successful at this demanding (though charming) form than the better known George Stevens. It’s very funny, chock-a-block with great character actors, and with wonderful music (Cole Porter) and choreography (Astaire with Hermes Pan). There’s something about works at the beginning of a form or style of cinema, even if rough and lacking couth, that I find more lovable and compelling than that form perfected (which in this case would be the gorgeous Top Hat made by Sandrich the next year)."

"I gotta throw a musical in there, and I’d go with The Band Wagon. Singin’ in the Rain is more exuberant, but [Vincent] Minnelli is one of my favorite stylists in cinema. You know, I love {Fred] Astaire, and I’m crazy about that film. I’ve loved it since I was in high school. Often, these favorites come and go, and they change position on your list, and you make room for other things that maybe you didn’t appreciate as strongly when you were younger, but I’ve always been crazy about that movie."

"W. C. Fields, with wife, mother-in-law, child, daughter, and son-in-law, played by the wonderful Grady Sutton. All this is pure enjoyment. When were movies ever more alive than in the thirties, when the great performers from the musical and vaudeville stage entered films? W. C. Fields, the Marx Brothers, Mae West, Maurice Chevalier, Fred Astaire, Marie Dressler, Mickey Rooney, and Judy Garland, among so many others. They were the real authors of their films, needing little help from their directors. American films began with audiences wanting to see performers, not directors, and this, perhaps, continues to separate American films from European films, but we’re lucky to have both, and who’s to say which is really better."

"I was a dancer, and this movie inspired me to become a dancer, I think. I grew up watching Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers films, and they really inspired me. I loved watching the big dance sequences in this film. Gene Kelly is phenomenal. I love that the film has fun looking into the transition from silence into sound in the movie world as well. It was a big challenge for a lot of actors to go from one to the other, and I think they have a really hilarious look at that transition. But also I think it’s these big dance numbers and big choreographed pieces with a hundred dancers on top of their game. You just wouldn’t see that anymore. You wouldn’t see sets like that either – the shots are just phenomenal."

"Next would be Kitty Foyle, which is the movie that Ginger Rogers won her Oscar for. She is obviously mostly remembered for a singing and dancing star from the Astaire and Rogers musicals, but this is a melodrama – there was no singing or dancing. It basically tells the story of a girl who grows up on the wrong side of the tracks and falls in love with a wealthy heir to a big Philadelphia fortune, and has to navigate romance and class and all of these different issues. It’s a very conservative film and it’s very didactic. It’s extremely problematic in a lot of ways, but I find it fascinating. The performance that she gives, though… I think a lot of times, some of these great stars, they win an Oscar for a movie that’s not their best work, or it’s sort of given as a consolation prize for them not winning for something that is a classic. I think people think that about Kitty Foyle because nobody watches it any more, and people only remember Ginger Rogers as a dancer, but her performance in this movie is stunning. The character she’s playing has to sort of take on different personas over the course of her life and with different people in her life. The way that Ginger Rogers performs those unique and distinct versions of the same person is just really incredible. Obviously, there’s a huge degree of difficulty to a career based on singing and dancing. I wrote about this in my book, but there’s that old line about Ginger Rogers that “She had to do everything Fred Astaire did, but backwards and in heels.” The whole idea of her stardom is about how much harder it is for a woman to do the same things that a man does. But all of that said, I think there’s a degree of difficulty to this performance that is the kind of thing that is really, true great acting and great stardom, but it’s the kind of thing where the labor doesn’t show, and so people don’t talk about it in that way."