This RKO film was directed by George Stevens, based on a P.G. Wodehouse story. It starred Fred Astaire and Joan Fontaine (the studio believed that the bloom was off the Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers pairing), with George Burns and Gracie Allen as the comedy leads. Reginald Gardner had a role as a butler who was nuts for the operettas of Flotow.

This was the last film score Gershwin completed (he died the same year, before finishing "The Goldwyn Follies"). Robert Russell Bennett orchestrated the score, which contains the songs "Nice Work if You can Get It," "A Foggy Day," and "Things are Looking Up." There is also an orchestral section, entitled "Stiff Upper Lip," which accompanies a wild trip by Astaire, Burns, and Allen through a funhouse at an English country fair. This active number takes the trio through moving floors, a turntable, rotating tubes, disappearing stairs, and mazes of distorting mirrors. Gershwin used groups of woodwinds in different keys from each other to depict the actors and their goofy reflections.

The film was not highly successful; the studio blamed the choice of Fontaine instead of Rogers as Astaire's dancing partner/love interest.

© All Music Guide

A Foggy Day (in London Town)

In early 1937 the Gershwin brothers were in Hollywood, at work on their second film for RKO, A Damsel in Distress, starring Fred Astaire and Joan Fontaine. At a late-night songwriting session, Ira mused that no one had written a song about fog and asked,"how about 'a foggy day in London' or maybe 'foggy day in London Town'?" The refrain was born in under an hour, and the whole song was finished two days later. Verse, chorus, and lyrics possess the relaxed, conversational fluency which characterized the Gershwins' work in this final springtime—a winsome, worldly casualness all the more persuasive for being the less insistent —

A foggy day in London Town

Had me low and had me down...

How long, I wondered, could this last

But the age of miracles hadn't passed

For suddenly I saw you there,

And through foggy London Town

The sun was shining everywhere.

Though set not in daylight London but on the moonlit grounds of a castle, Astaire's wistful rendering was lavished with special effects to make what theater chronicler Stanley Green called "a pictorial gem."

© All Music Guide

Nice Work If You Can Get It

For the last song to be heard in RKO's 1937 Damsel in Distress, Gershwin lifted nine bars of an unused song, There's No Stopping Me Now, from about 1930. Around this he and his lyricist-brother Ira confected their ultimate standard in the "looking for love" vein, Nice Work if You Can Get It. The verse is notable for its unforced vocal syncopation capturing the gestures of speech with a musing air—



The man who lives for only making money

Lives a life that isn't necessarily sunny.

Likewise the man who works for fame,

There's no guarantee that time won't erase his name.



The fact is, the only work that really brings enjoyment

Is the kind that is for girl and boy meant.

Fall in love, you won't regret it,

That's the very best work of all if you can get it....



before the refrain's yearning anthem gives away the pretense of the detached observer—



Loving one who loves you,

And then taking that vow,

Nice work if you can get it,

And if you get it,

Won't you tell me how?

© All Music Guide