"...(In the Astaire-Rogers canon) Shall We Dance is a high point. It has the George and Ira Gershwin songs. It has Edward Everett Horton and Eric Blore at the peak of their odd forms. And it has the best script of the entire series, with genuinely funny scenes and situations and often witty lines (credited to Allan Scott and Ernest Pagano) in the best tradition of thirties movie comedy. But above all, Shall We Dance is the most moving and satisfying of all the Astaire-Rogers films precisely because-at what turned out to be the climax of their career together-it is the only one of their films in which plot and screenplay consistently amplify and enrich the great dance numbers...For it is only with Rogers in this period that Astaire's sunny, almost Mozartean art fully reveals one of its final and most urgent meanings: the conviction that romance between men and women is not so much a matter of sustaining illusions as of penetrating and even 'dancing' over them. That warmth and tenderness and love may also mean humor and intelligence and style." James Harvey, Romantic Comedy