LAUSR

The Depression era Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers vehicle Swing Time (George Stevens, 1936) is the fifth film in the duo’s cycle for RKO Pictures (It is the sixth if one counts Flying Down to Rio (1933). However, the actors do not play the protagonists in that film and there was no intention for it to inaugurate a series). In contrast with the preceding films, its protagonists are expressly figured as working class as opposed to the bourgeoisie (In Follow the Fleet from the same year Astaire and Rogers play, respectively, a sailor and a dance hostess, but their class status is not thematised to the same extent). Swing Time tells the story of John “Lucky” Garnett (Astaire), a dancer and gambler who in the outset of the film is preparing to marry Margaret Watson (Betty Furness), a woman from an upper middle-class family with whom he has reconnected having performed in his hometown. Resentful of his abandonment, the rest of his dance troupe delay him to the extent that he is so late that the father of the bride calls the marriage off, and will only deign to agree to it if Lucky manages to raise $25,000. Lucky accordingly sets off to New York with his ageing sidekick Edwin “Pop” Cardetti (Victor Moore) in order to find his fortune, but while he is there, he falls in love with Penny Carroll (Ginger Rogers), a working class dance teacher, and by the end of the film, he has coupled up with her. Due to this narrative trajectory, Graham Cassano has argued in one of the few academic articles to have been published on the film that Swing Time “offers a fiery indictment” of bourgeois values “while, at the same time, portraying an oppositional working class community” (330). However, in this article I want to argue that, while Swing Time certainly opposes the domination of capital, it does so not in its championing of working class culture against the supposed decadence of the wealthy and privileged, but rather by instantiating and engendering a form of reason and rationality which capitalism impedes. Central to this, I will contend, are two scenes near the end of the film in which all of the characters present burst into uncontrollable