Carefree

The musicals starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers used farcical plots, executed with varying degrees of skill, as a pretext for gliding almost weightlessly through the dance scenes. In Carefree, the musical numbers are somewhat shorter than usual, which makes them seem even more dreamlike. To compensate, the story offers extravagant psychological flourishes: because his lover (Rogers) is having relationship problems, her fiancé sends her to her best friend, a psychiatrist (Astaire), with whom she promptly falls in love. Twice, the pretty girl talks nonsense while under hypnosis: the first time, she wears a black dress with a heart on it, at which half a dozen arrows are aimed; the second time, she grabs a rifle to shoot everything down. In the end, she literally gets away with a black eye. (C.H.)