The Gay Divorcee pride in his craftsmanship and objects to outside interference. All of them plus the Continental, help to make the new Music Hall show the source of a good deal of innocent merriment.” The film was nominated for the following Academy Awards, winning in the category Music (Song): The Gay Divorcee The Gay Divorcee is a 1934 American musical film directed by Mark Sandrich and starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. It also features Alice Brady, Edward Everett Horton, Eric Blore, and Erik Rhodes, and was based on the Broadway musical "Gay Divorce", written by Dwight Taylor from an unproduced play
Fred Astaire is credited with two important innovations in early film musicals. First, he insisted that a closely tracking dolly camera film a dance routine in as few shots as possible, typically with just four to eight cuts, while holding the dancers in full view at all times. This gave the illusion of an almost stationary camera filming an entire dance in a single shot. Astaire famously quipped: "Either the camera will dance, or I will." Astaire maintained this policy from "The Gay Divorcee" in 1934 onwards until his last film musical, "Finian's Rainbow", made in 1968, when he was overruled by