Reviews

For me the primary reason for watching a Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire musical is to see the couple create a little magic on the dance floor, sadly though there's none of that on show in the first half of this and what there is in the second half is nowhere near enough to compensate.

Fred Astaire is without doubt one of the finest dancers ever to light up a screen and Leslie Caron is certainly no slouch in that sphere either, but for me there's just very little magic to be found in the dance numbers on display here.

The Piper is quite a nicely presented take on the Pied Piper lore that fairly quickly managed to draw me in and with its nicely evolving tale kept me there for the duration so I'm happy to award it a +

On the plus side the cinematography is generally nice, the basic dramatic premise one that will always find a level of favour with me and there are certainly moments where the comedy is nicely presented (especially so with some of W.C.

Brown is well enough cast as the lead and actually proves rather effective in combining both the comical and dramatic, though it does have to be said his affected accent does really grate during proceedings.

Those involving the dummy perhaps naturally come across a little flat whilst the show numbers are generally not that impressive and largely peripheral to the story which unfortunately does make some of them begin to feel a little like padding at times.

There's nothing remarkable about the production either, it's all rather vanilla and workmanlike with little camera movement or flair on show, whilst the song and dance numbers are generally presentable but fairly routine too.

The musical numbers are generally nicely interspersed though which helped maintain interest and, where the first half began to drag at times, the tale does develop a little heart in the second half and is much the better for that.

Early musical drama with a little comedy thrown in that struggles to achieve much above mediocrity for much of the first hour but is definitely aided by the big name stars that lend their names to proceedings in the final half hour.

The dance routines are sadly also rather unremarkable, in the first half they are more vaudevillian in nature which is perfectly in keeping with the plot and whilst the charity show in the second half does give the opportunity for an attempt at a big dance number unfortunately it's not particularly ...