Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: The Sky's The Limit!

Article theme: War - Edwin Starr

"Psst - Fred, don't look now but I think you're featured on Pat Bastard's blðg again."

Not only the best and most overlooked Hollywood musical, but also the greatest accidentally anti-war movie of all time, it's too obvious a pun to call RKO's 1943 opus The Sky's The Limit Fred Astaire's shining hour (because that is the title of its main theme song), but I just did, so now what, bitch?

Actually, I'm assuming it was unintentional - even a kino factory like RKO wouldn't have dared commit a major star like Astaire to a based isolationist peacenik project at the height of the hostilities - but, just as every Hollywood attempt to marry pozzed messaging with actual artistic talent ends in divorce, so too this effort to keep proto-neocon support for the worst and most destructive war in history high undermines itself so hard you might just start to wonder.

Never forget that the same balding twinks who smirk media literately over the ebin propaganda satire in Starship Troopers also soyface into lockjaw over the Holy War Against Fashism based on this sort of farcically corny agitslop.

Astaire plays Fred (perhaps a clue that this complex character is closer to the real him than his typically airy persona), a fighter ace directed to perform a PR tour from coast to coast on his fleeting leave from the Pacific theatre who goes AWOL instead. The reason suggested is just boredom with his obligations and a yen for anonymity in a country that sees him as a hero for killing le ebil Japs, but this is surface level motivation. Disaffection with the whole war fits better and is supported by the scenes where Fred berates an aeronautical tycoon over the fitness of his aircraft for combat purposes at an obsequious works party in his honour. Through this point he's been a charming prankster, trying to lose himself in the escapism of civilian life, but in this scene his unloading becomes impassioned, showing-without-telling of psychological scars a studio propaganda flick of the period would otherwise have swept under the rug.

"Young man, what are you saying?"
"Look, personally I just prefer allies who don't sink our ships, send letter bombs to the White House, bomb our buildings and frame the Muslim Brotherhood for it, buy all our politicians and run pedo blackmail rings on our own soil."
"I simply won't hear such Woke Right Anti-Semolina-Pudding! Out I say!" - actual dialogue.

But the unravelling of Fred is gradual, a calendar in which he ticks off the days of his dwindling leave acting like those clocks in Rumble Fish, reminding us of the time elapsing before his freedom runs out, serving as a minimalistic motif to keep the rude awakening ahead in mind throughout the dream that plays out for us in between. First Fred goes looking for romance, and finds it by inventing photobombing and otherwise trolling Joan Leslie's qt3.14 photographer into falling for his impish charms.

Remember, boys: if she never looks at you like this...

...She'll never look at you like this.

It's a great romance of the cinéma and our foreknowledge of its doomed fate only makes it more poignant and none the less enjoyable as comic entertainment. Crack all the celluloid-closet jokes you will about our Fred, his chemistry with Leslie speaks of straightness you or I can but aspire to (well, you, anyway). Nor can we deny the sack required to smash his "One For My Baby And One For The Road" routine, in which the great danceman opened a leg shattering glass this way and that in an outpouring of sorrow as primal as it is precise. "Can't act" my taint, guy who wrote his infamous first screen test notes, this is a performance physical and emotional that mogs the talents of every pretentious thespian ever to don tights and also unrelatedly play Shakespeare.

On this b└og we stan a STRAIGHT king.