"Seeing Top Hat for the first time in the early fifties was like seeing a film made in ancient Egypt. It had stylization on top of stylization. The plot and settings and manners and clothes established one level of artifice, and balanced on top of that were perfect cut-glass flowerings of dance and song that rose to infinite heights.... Contemporary reviews praised its spontaneity, its smooth integration of plot and musical numbers. That was what its makers worked for, and if the results to a later generation seem supererogatory, it's because the whole film starts from a non-literal premise. In the class-conscious thirties, it was possible to imagine characters who spent their lives in evening dress...holdovers from the twenties.... It was a dead image...but it was the only image of luxury that people believed in.... Top Hat gives us Astaire in the best role ever written for a dancer in a movie; the dance technique is an element in the characterization.... (Astaire's) tap-dancing feet are the film's leitmotiv: they tap on the box of the hansom cab to let (Ginger Rogers) know that she's his prisoner; tapping again on the ceiling of the Lido hotel room, they spring the plot onto its homeward course." Arlene Croce, The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Book