Here’s an extraordinary piece of musical filmmaking that really should be more celebrated than it is. It’s the big, fat, ultimate dance number from ‘The Gay Divorcee’ (1934), the second film to pair Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers and the first to be properly considered a starring vehicle for them. ‘The Continental’, written by Con Conrad and Herb Magidson, is the name of the dance of course and thus deserved a proper dance production number. But who would have dreamed it would become the epic that you see posted above? Though the movie was directed by Mark Sandrich, the ‘dance director’ was the uncredited Dave Gould, a mysterious figure who was the first person to win the Oscar in a short-lived category called ‘Best Dance Direction’ for a 1936 musical called ‘Follies Bergere’ (something tells me it was set in Paris). Frankly, until unearthing this masterpiece after posting another number from ‘Gay Divorcee’ yesterday (“I’m Looking For A Needle In A Haystack”) I’d never heard of Gould. How the person who designed and executed ‘The Continental’ can somehow not be in the Pantheon of Berkeley/Donen/Kelly/Hermes Pan/Jack Cole etc. is beyond me. Here’s Gould’s Wikipedia entry–far too short but perhaps this is all there is. We’ll do a deep dive into the Dave Gould of it all over the next few days. Meanwhile, dig into the above clip. It’s a doozy.