At the Tremont and the Old South

With Fred Astaire reputedly dancing for the last time in "Blue Skies," it is particularly pleasant to have one of the middle-thirties vintage of Astaire musicals in town displaying his terpsichorean felicity and his personal case of manner at their characteristic best. That "Top Hat" bases a mounting series of un-excruciating events on a carefully mistaken identity and calls it a story matters little. Astaire and Ginger Rogers are on a Boston screen, and they sing Irving Berlin songs and dance to them, and there isn't slightest him of a neurosis or psychoanalyst in the whole picture.

The Berlin songs are among his best. Although "Dancing Cheek to Cheek" has lasted longest in the popular car, "What A Lovely Day To Get Caught In the Rain" zips along and bounces in up-to-date style, and "Top Hat" itself makes most current production numbers look like minor-leaguers.

As for such miscellaneous ingredients as plot and cast, the former is slight and the latter is slick. Full of such odd characters as a valet recruited from the Salvation Army who refers to himself as "we" and a typical Edward Everett Horton queer played by Edward Everett Horton, the picture supplies at least a token of filler between the main-event Rogers Astaire routines.