Dancing in the dark: Astaire and Rogers made sweet screen magic.

Astaire & Rogers Collection, Volume 1. DVD; set $59.92; each 19.97.

Top Hat RKO, 1935. Directed by Mark Sandrich. 100 minutes.

Follow the fleet RKO, 1936. Directed by Mark Sandrich, 110 minutes.

Swing Time RKO, 1936. Directed by George Stevens, 103 minutes.

Shall We Dance RKO, 1937. Directed by Mark Sandrich, 109 minutes.

The Barkleys of Broadway MGM, 1949. Directed by Charles Waiters, 109 minutes.

Argumentative types can raise objections to Shakespeare or Picasso--even Balanchine. They were mere geniuses, so their work leaves room for interpretation. But it's impossible to argue with perfection of craft, and the dances committed to film by Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers are, quite simply, beyond cavil.

This is no lucky accident. Astaire, a professional dancer from the age of 7, did all of his own choreography, and he was as exacting about corrections as the most persnickety repetiteur. He was willing--and able--to work until the screen image was without visible flaws. Rogers, another consummate professional, kept pace. A montage of the dancing in their nine movies together would probably be unwatchable--akin to looking too long at the sun. Reams have been written about it. A sentence or two can't capture their magic any more than a book. They were, in the deepest sense, complementary--opposite, equal, two who made one. Her brash buoyancy and his effortless elegance lifted the audience into the stratosphere. The films themselves, on the other hand, vary quite a bit, with lapses in casting, writing, and pacing that sometimes undermine their value as settings for the dances.

That variety, is evident in the five films recently released on DVD by Warner Home Video. Of these five, Top Hat (1935) comes closest to being quintessential. Quintessentially, you need Edward Everett Horton, and here he is, elegantly turned out as the producer of Fred's show. You need Eric Blore, and here he is, the most resourceful of butlers, introducing himself with the immortal line, "We are Bates." And most quintessentially, you need Fred and Ginger to start off spatting and end up dancing.

So here comes Fred, tapping furiously on the polished floor of a London hotel room while the camera goes down, past the ceiling of the room below and into the bed where Ginger is trying to sleep. Astaire gets so much of the credit for these movies, it's hard not to watch him. But look at Ginger as she starts falling for him during a downpour. He seems to be doing all the work, singing Irving Berlin's "Isn't It a Lovely Day to Be Caught in the Rain." But as she listens, you see her resistance melting away bit by bit. Fred needs words and music and motion to express his deepest feelings. Ginger needs only her face.

The dramatic shadings she brought to their collaboration are most evident in The Barteleys of Broadway (1949). The story of a pair of feuding (though married) entertainers, it was originally meant for Astaire and Judy Garland. When Garland fell ill, Rogers was brought in--a full decade after her last duet with him. The script, by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, breezily echoes real life. Dinah Barkley is chafing under the limitations of Josh Barkley's song-and-dance shows and wants to be a legitimate actress (check). The couple are both partners and rivals (check). Given the sometimes testy relationship between Rogers and Astaire, it feels almost like an extended inside joke.

When Dinah and Josh finally reconcile--am I giving something away here?--and dance to the Gershwin classic "They Can't Take That Away From Me," the emotional sparks fly, and not just because of the song's association with one of their great earlier films, Shall We Dance (1937). We're invested in their rekindled romance because we're so fully aware of Dinah's interior life.

George and Ira Gershwin wrote the songs in Shall We Dance expressly for Rogers and Astaire. The plot centers on the unlikely pairing of a ballet star and a revue queen. It's complicated and fairly silly. But when Fred sings "They Can't Take That Away" to her on a fog-bound ferry, all silliness is dispelled by the sheer force of the moment. And they're not even dancing! When they do get around to it, they perform some of the most inventive numbers ever put on film--their bravura roller-skate through Central Park and Fred's romp in an immaculate white engine room accompanied by an ensemble of black stokers.

There are two ways to think about the racism implicit in numbers like "Zoom, Zoom." To his credit, Astaire was giving black artists work and exposing their talents to a wider audience. But he was doing it with what looks today like breathtaking condescension. For all the brilliance in the conception of the sequence, it leaves you feeling vaguely pained. There's an even more disturbing example in Swing Time (1936), when, in a "tribute" to Bill Robinson, Astaire dons blackface. He genuinely admired the black tappers he was emulating, but the films reflect the unpleasant social attitudes of the day.

By contrast, the social realities are barely visible. The reason becomes clear when Fred and Ginger leave behind their butlers and ritzy hotels, as they do in Swing Time and Follow the Fleet (1936), to take up residence in a more mundane milieu. They don't really belong there. Swing Time has a more serious problem: Simple cruelty seems to be driving the story. First Fred, a vaudeville dancer about to leave the act to get married, is maliciously foiled by the other dancers and the aggressively cute George Moore, who breaks up the act anyway by tagging along when Fred hops a freight. And Moore repeatedly cons Helen Broderick, the wry and endearing older woman of several Astaire-Rogers films. Still, there are superb numbers, to the songs of Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields--the comic "Pick Yourself Up," the sentimental "Way You Look Tonight." And the snowy wonderland setting of "A Fine Romance" gleams in the remastered black-and-white photography.

In fact, the silvered palette of the black-and-white DVDs gives the Technicolor sheen of Barkleys some serious competition. The extras include an assortment of trailers, shorts, interview segments, and running commentaries from film scholar Larry Billman and Ava Astaire McKenzie, Fred's daughter. But the real reason to indulge in these DVDs is just that--to indulge.

Sylviane Gold has written about theater for Newsday and The New York Times.