July 10 movie: The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle. Fred and Ginger's last RKO movie together, it's the only movie of theirs I hadn't seen yet. I had heard it was a lesser effort for them, and that's definitely true. They were constrained by the biographical story and couldn't do one of the silly screwball comedies that worked so well for them. The latter half is sort of a war movie, with Vernon joining up in WWI and dying during the war. There's a lengthy sequence where Vernon wants to join up as soon as the war starts, but Irene talks him out of it because she wants to retire to a country house and raise kids and have a quiet normal life. And Vernon has to convince Irene that her desire for quiet and ... one could even say isolation is wrong. With the movie having been made in 1939, I shouldn't have been surprised to see this come up.
I read on Wikipedia that Irene Castle, who was still alive, was a consultant for the movie, and she got really pissed off because of changes they made to her life story. She particularly clashed with Ginger Rogers, who refused to cut or dye her hair, or to wear accurate costumes. Apparently Irene Castle had been quite the trend-setter in the teens, but Rogers insisted on wearing clothes in the style of 1939. I did recognize a costume in the movie that was based on one Castle wore in a photo in Wikipedia, but you can tell that it was cut very differently.
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