Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #148748 in DVD
• Released on: 2003-10-28
• Rating: G (General Audience)
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Formats: Color, DVD, Full Screen, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 177 minutes

Amazon.com
Royal Wedding
Fred Astaire dances on the ceiling in this 1951 Alan Jay Lerner musical for MGM, directed by Stanley Donen (Singin' in the Rain). The appealing story finds Astaire as part of a brother-and-sister act (along with Jane Powell) that travels to London at the time of Queen Elizabeth II's wedding. Astaire and Powell each find romances that threaten to break up the act, but that's mostly fun window dressing in a movie better known for some truly creative sequences made vivid by Donen, including Astaire's famous dance with a hat rack and his duet with Powell, "How Could You Believe Me When I Said I Loved You (When You Know I've Been a Liar All My Life)?" --Tom Keogh

Second Chorus
Second Chorus has one little gem of a moment that has found its way into many Fred Astaire highlight reels. Astaire sings and taps "I Ain't Hep to That Step but I'll Dig It" then tries to coax Paulette Goddard onto the floor. She declines twice, then joins him in a joyous dance. The rest of the movie is not as enticing. Astaire and Burgess Meredith portray trumpet players vying for a spot in Artie Shaw's orchestra and for the affections of Goddard. The interplay among the three stars has its charms, and there's plenty of toe-tapping big-band music from Shaw, who plays himself in a substantial part and wrote the Oscar-nominated "Would You Like to Be the Love of My Life" with Johnny Mercer. Filmed in 1940, Second Chorus pales in comparison to the nine-film Astaire-Ginger Rogers partnership that had just ended. Astaire doesn't dance enough, and a tedious subplot involving Charles Butterworth stretches the movie about 15 minutes too long. No great surprise that like Royal Wedding, Second Chorus has slipped into the public domain and is generally available in poor-quality prints. --David Horiuchi

Customer Reviews

VERY POOR QUALITY
Unfortunately the release of this DVD with such poor visual and sound quality is appalling. One expects sharpness, one gets a version worse than one sees on television. Don't bother buying this version!!

Beware this "bootleg" DVD
ROYAL WEDDING isn't on DVD yet. That's because the OWNER of the film, Warner Bros. hasn't released it yet.

But several other companies have, under the "guise" of public domain. The original copyright on the film was not renewed properly with the Library of Congress, so the film is perceived to be public domain, although the music is very much copyrighted and every distributor of this movie is participating in copyright infringement by selling these "bootlegs".

The companies make the money, because they're selling OTHER people's property.

The people who ultimately suffer are YOU, THE CONSUMER, unknowingly buying products of inferior (worse than professional VHS) quality, thinking you're getting the real thing, because it's a DVD.

Save your money. Wait until Warner Bros. gives us the real thing
thing...

And by the way, the movie gets 4 stars, it's the cheapo bootleg DVD that gets 1 star!