“Swing Time is a movie about a myth, the myth of Fred and Ginger and the imaginary world of romance they live in. It is a world of nighttime frolics very much like Top Hat's, but it is also a middle-class, workaday, American world. It is top hats and empty pockets: Fred as a Depression dandy hopping a freight car, Ginger being sung to with soap in her hair.... Swing Time is based on Top Hat, not as a remake, but as a jazz rhapsody might be based on a classic theme; its materials are romantic irony, contrast, the fantasy of things going in reverse.... If you put Top Hat in a glass ball like a paperweight and turned it upside down, it would be Swing Time.... Like Top Hat, Swing Time is full of nostalgia for the high life of the Twenties, for what Stanley Walker called ‘the night club era.' Manhattan is glamorized as a town where fortunes are openly made and lost each night at the roulette tables, a slight breach of history. The film freely mixes Twenties and Thirties references.... The songs are more tightly interwoven with the script - and with each other - than in any other Astaire-Rogers film....” --Arlene Croce, “The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Book.”
Swing Time includes, in addition to “A Fine Romance” and “The Way You Look Tonight,” Astaire's tribute to Bill Robinson, “Bojangles of Harlem.”