The first film to feature Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers as a team (after their debut as supporting players in Flying Down to Rio), The Gay Divorcee is highlighted by the seductively beautiful dance number, “Night and Day”; the finale, “The Continental”; and “A Needle in a Haystack,” in which the Astaire screen character is elegantly defined for all time, “...and we believe in him as in no screen hero since Keaton.... Here he demonstrates that screen choreography could consist of a man dancing alone in his living room.... When one considers that only ten minutes of The Gay Divorcee are taken up by the dancing of Astaire alone or with Rogers, the film's enduring popularity seems more than ever a tribute to the power of what those minutes contain....” --Arlene Croce, “The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Book.”
The film's other 97 minutes contain a lot of clowning by the inimitable Edward Everett Horton, along with Alice Brady, Erik Rhodes and Eric Blore; more songs and dances (including “Let's K-nock K-neez” by Horton and Betty Grable); and the always wonderful “whirligig of a production number.”