Follow the Fleet has one of the more engaging narrative conceits of the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers vehicles: formerly song-and-dance partners, Astaire’s “Bake” Baker has joined the Navy after Rogers’ Sherry Martin rejected his marriage proposal. Now on leave a few years later, Bake runs into Sherry at a nightclub, and they tentatively rekindle their relationship. Some of this is done by dancing together — including Irving Berlin’s “Let’s Face the Music and Dance” — but the standout numbers here, ironically, are their solo ones. Rogers gets her only solo tap performance in any of their films together (“Let Yourself Go,” also by Berlin), while Astaire has a wondrous routine in which he commands a chorus of sailors simply with the beat of his feet (a sequence that must have inspired Channing Tatum’s uproarious “No Dames” bit in Hail, Caesar!) My favorite moment, however, might be Astaire’s casual noodling on a piano at one point, cigarette dangling from his lip. It’s missing the studied self-consciousness that can often be felt even in his most joyous routines. Good fun overall, if missing the bravura duets of their best pictures, as well as any real comic relief. (The subplot here involves Bake’s boorish shipmate — played by Randolph Scott of Roberta — and his Neanderthal pursuit of Sherry’s sister, played by Harriet Hilliard.)
