FUCKING LOOK AT THIS. Someone posted a colourised version of this clip on Mastodon, which was ho-hum enough that I went in search of the scene in proper b&w and duly found it. Not everything needs to be run through a wobbly AI to make it look “new”, especially when it’s not even convincing at doing that. But… just… LOOK at it. Seriously. Fred Astaire apparently claimed this was the best film dance scene he’d ever seen, and I’m not going to disagree with him on that point.
The amazing thing about this is that there’s just so many points where something could’ve gone horrifically wrong and everything would’ve been absolutely fucked. I presume the whole thing was shot with multiple cameras cos it looks like one take (albeit edited from multiple positions—and albeit from some reasonably long shots, too, this is not super-edited), and really, anything could’ve gone wrong. It finally gets to the end on the large flight of stairs and they’re kind of piggybacking each other on the way back down while doing the splits and I just shouted “JESUS CHRIST!” at that point (I actually couldn’t watch it on my second viewing). I mean, nothing does go wrong but if you’re like me you’ll watch this wondering when something will… and then you’ll wonder how nothing did. Phenomenal.
