Enhanced by a Gershwin score that includes the now classic “They Can't Take That Away from Me,” Shall We Dance is one of the wittiest of the Astaire-Rogers musicals, made at a time when, as Arlene Croce writes (in “The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Book”), “Ballet was in the air. It had come to Broadway via Balanchine...and to Hollywood via Nijinsky...and deMille.... The plot of Shall We Dance cast Astaire as an American ballet star who dances under a Russian name and who falls in love with Astaire-style dancing and with a Ginger Rogers-style dancer. It projected the dualism of Gershwin's own career...and it gave Astaire a motif for his dances. It also contained some imaginative devices that were quite as good as anything in Swing Time - better, because they were visual: the flip book of pictures that dissolves into Rogers dancing and the lifesize wax model of Rogers.... These elements - the ballet vs. musical comedy theme and the real vs. false Ginger theme - are merely stated in the course of the plot; they aren't dramatized and they don't even become themes until the big production number at the end of the film makes them more riotously exciting than we can believe possible.”