Movie criticism suffered a loss when, in the mid-sixties, Miss Croce abandoned the field and gave most of her energies to dance criticism; now she has joined her two major talents. No one has ever described dance in movies the way she does: she’s a slangy, elegant writer; her compressed descriptions are evocative and analytic at the same time, and so precise and fresh that while bringing the pleasure of the dances back she adds to it. There is a sense of pressure in her style that has something like the tension and pull of the dances themselves. Her descriptions are original and imperially brusque in a way that keeps the reader alert; one responds to her writing kinesthetically, as if it were dance...

For Miss Croce, in the best Astaire-and-Rogers films (The Gay Divorcee, Roberta, Top Hat, Follow the Fleet, Swing Time) something happened that “never happened in movies again” — “dancing was transformed into a vehicle of serious emotion between a man and a woman.” And from this, I think, flow my disagreements with her. We have had many happy arguments about dance and movies; I suspect that they hinge on temperament. Miss Croce (she is the editor of Ballet Review) is a perfectionist — a romantic perfectionist. I, too, find Astaire and Rogers rapturous together, but Miss Croce’s romanticism about the two leads her to ascribe a dance perfection to them. I think that Astaire’s dry buoyancy comes through best in his solos, which are more exciting dances than the romantic ballroom numbers with Rogers. Miss Croce says Rogers’ “technique became exactly what she needed in order to dance with Fred Astaire, and, as no other woman in movies ever did, she created the feeling that stirs us so deeply when we see them together: Fred need not be alone.” Well, that’s maybe a bit much.