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stage.

    “This Heart of Mine: A Dance Story” was fashioned around a song featuring a lilting melody by Harry Warren and overripe lyrics by none other than Arthur Freed (“And then quite suddenly I saw you and I dreamed of gay amours. At dawn I’ll wake up singing sentimental overtures.”). The scenario was pure fairy tale: On a summer evening in 1850, a ball is in progress inside a glittering pavilion that resembles a gigantic wedding cake. The guests include Astaire, sporting a monocle and an expression of ne’er-do-well, and a tiara-topped Bremer, looking très distingué in a luxurious chinchilla wrap. In this gloriously artificial setting, Astaire’s suave imposter pilfers Bremer’s diamonds, though she doesn’t seem to mind, as he’s also stolen her heart. The “story” may have been slight, but who cared? As glamorous spectacle, the sequence achieves some kind of Freed Unit nirvana.
    If all that weren’t enough, “This Heart of Mine” also marked the first teaming of Minnelli and designer Tony Duquette, who created some of the exquisitely over-the-top trappings for the sequence. “Vincente and Tony were very close,” says designer and one-time Duquette assistant Leonard Stanley:
    The first movie Tony worked on with Minnelli was Ziegfeld Follies , which was done in 1944 but never released to the public until 1946. It was really made during the war when Tony was in the army and stationed at Long Beach or somewhere near the coast. He would occasionally go off by himself because he was doing these sketches for Vincente for Ziegfeld Follies . . . . One day, these two MPs saw him sketching. They actually thought he was a spy sketching the military layout of the camp that Tony was stationed at. But it was really all of these designs for Vincente’s movie. Tony— a spy ! That just broke me up. 1
    Astaire and Bremer’s second teaming, “Limehouse Blues,” was inspired by the haunting Gertrude Lawrence tune of the same name and Lillian Gish’s silent classic Broken Blossoms . The critics were all in accord that this sublime “dramatic pantomime” was the highlight of Freed’s Follies . Appearing in Oriental make-up, Astaire is Tai Long (“in his shifty slouch, one detects the characteristic movement of the outcast”). Tai inhabits a seedy waterfront world of streetwalkers, sailors, and drunken vagrants. Minnelli had a field day filling up his frame with all of the necessary types from Central Casting: a wizened Chinaman smoking an opium pipe, some overeager trollops, a band of raucous buskers, and a transient pushing a Victrola in a baby carriage.
    Out of the London fog appears Bremer’s Moy Ling (“to look into her eyes is to look into the solemn depths of a cathedral”). Clad in retina-arresting canary yellow, Moy is the only spot of brightness in Tai’s colorless existence. He is immediately entranced and begins following her. After observing Moy
as she admires an Oriental fan in a shop window, Tai is mistaken for a robber and shot. On the brink of death, he falls into a hallucinatory delirium—though even in his fantasy, Tai’s search for the elusive Moy continues. Now in possession of the fan she once coveted, Moy uses it to lure Tai into the darkened depths of his subconscious. When he finally reaches Moy and touches the fan, all is suddenly light—and chinoiserie. They dance together and achieve the sort of harmonious union that wasn’t possible back in the real world. “Limehouse Blues” would be hailed as “the finest production number ever poured into a screen revue,” and Minnelli considered the end result “a total triumph.” 2 The sequence is not only a visual stunner but also achieves something distinctly Minnelli: taking the viewer inside an unreality (Astaire’s dream) within a “reality” (MGM’s version of old Chinatown) that was itself a nonreality to begin with.
    “One of the things that I always remember about the mise-en-scène of ‘Limehouse Blues’ is that