Brakathor First of all, clearly this is one of those movies for people who love this kind of music, love the kind of song and dance fare that Fred Astaire is famous for, and don't care two blinks about the package it's delivered in. As such, it's a film which like most musicals, you can't really judge in terms of conventional plot structure. That being said, the film as a total package is nothing short of a trainwreck on so many levels, by conventional standards. Fred Astaire was clearly a wizard at his craft, of that there's no question. Watching the dance routines where he's on tables and bartops is like watching a magician perform a magic trick. All musical numbers aside however, the roles are horribly miscast, the romantic relationship is extremely contrived and forced, and the plot devices are just so over the top that it all comes together as a film so unconventional that it's actually amazing in its own way.With that, I think it's high time to address the title of this review. It's fairly evident from the dialogue and the various plot elements that the two main Characters played by Fred Astaire and Joan Leslie are both intended to be young adults in their twenties. Leslie's character is an established and well respected photographer who works in the editorial department of a publishing company. However, Joan Leslie was only 17 when this was filmed, and the incongruity there is definitely glaring. 43 at the time, Fred Astaire's character is a pilot with a carefree nature to the point of coming cross as a total loafer, who flees his military tour leave, opting to find his own adventure in the coming week or so. While having no apparent work related skillset aside from piloting aircraft, it just so happens that he can sing and dance up a storm. Apparently this is something that all average Joes can do, as it hasn't been worked into the character's history AT ALL or cross-examined in the slightest. All this, in addition to when he says "I'll have to ask my parents if they approve," after Joan proposes marriage to him, suggests that the character is intended to be much younger. At any rate, the Character of "Fred" is very poorly developed.In the end, it looks incredibly less conspicuous on paper to have a 20 something year old man aggressively pursuing a 20 something year old woman than it comes across on screen to have a 43 year old man so aggressively pursuing a 17 year old girl/woman. Let me put every emphasis on AGGRESSIVELY here. It's not just the fact of an older man having a love interest in a younger woman. He literally stalks her for the first half of the movie. I really feel like I need to detail the plot progression based around this premise, if for nothing else than for my own amusement. He meets her at her bar where he creepily tries to appear in all of her photos that she's taking for the event being held there. She finds him quirky, but essentially tells him to buzz off. She leaves for a quieter venue to grab a bite to eat, and he follows her here. He pays her way, yet she sort of leaves him in the lurch and bails almost instantly, seemingly eager to get away, albeit politely. She then leaves the bar and he follows her home sneaking up behind her. After she threatens to call the police, they both suddenly begin singing lyrical suggestions to each other, which comes across so contrived given that she's told him to go away and leave her alone numerous times already, that it seems like more of a misdirection by Leslie's character to distract him long enough so that he doesn't haul her into a side alley and rape her, rather than actual developing chemistry between the two characters, a speculation soon confirmed when she finally reaches her place of residence, and says goodbye, seemingly hoping to never see him again. Not soon to be so easily discarded, he notices a vacancy sign in the window and swiftly makes her place his new home (landlords were less discriminating in the old days, I guess). When she wakes up, she's shocked and appalled to see him living there, then leaves for work to take some photographs at the docks. He follows her here. She's even more furious than before. She then goes to her office and he follows her here as well, creating a huge scene in front of everyone working there.Just think about this for a second. Imagine you're living in a group home, and you follow one of your housemates around for their entire hour working day, who you know and are friends with. That would be a little bit creepy and crazy wouldn't it? Now imagine doing it to a total stranger. Despite being angry/annoyed by him, rather than call the police on him like any normal rational young woman might do, she inexplicably offers him a job interview instead, even though he expresses no desire to work whatsoever. Later that night she attends a private event, and he's invited to tag along. Get it boys? The lesson here is to stalk random women who you don't even know, but find sexy, and the minute you come across as a complete stalker/rapist is when they will swoon over you and let you into their lives. You've really got to love the culture contrast between 2018 and 1943. Playing this movie to a group of modern day feminists sure would be fun.Ultimately, the film of course is a comedy, but if you were to replace the film score with a horror/thriller soundtrack, it would actually come across as quite scary/ominous up to this point, and I doubt you'd be able to tell the difference. Honestly, if Leslie's character continued to rebuke Astaire's character after this point, I feel like his character is so unstable that he would have escalated to the point of throwing her into a car trunk. I'll leave the rest to your imagination. This one really is begging to be lampooned in a Youtube edit. Anyway, at the private event, Astaire's character comes across as overly obtrusive, and muscles his way into a musical act that she performs in front of the crowd, one which we're intended to believe is completely ad-libbed by the two characters, my favorite line in which was "you better start stripping," by Astaire. Apparently that won her over, because now at 40 minutes in, she appears to have firmly decided that she likes him, despite her many grumpy faces up until this point.I see so many other reviews commenting on the "great chemistry" between Joan Leslie and Fred Astaire in this film, but honestly I just don't see it. Her character is supposed to go from angry to jovial to angry to jovial so many times in the first half of the film. I really don't know how one should act out such a schizophrenic role, but in the end when she proposes marriage to him, a total of 20 minutes and one day later, it would be a massive understatement to say that it comes across as a nonsensical plot contrivance for an enterprising career oriented young woman to suddenly out of nowhere, be inspired to propose marriage to a jobless middle-aged deadbeat who she knows next to nothing about, who's clearly mentally unstable, and who's been stalking her for the past few days. Fred Astaire was not even a particularly good-looking guy either.I do understand that in the old days, for the mostpart you really couldn't have sexual flings without completely destroying your reputation, especially for the woman, and as with so many early films, this sudden and unexpected marriage proposal couldn't come across as anything other than. "I really really badly want to go pokies with you, but I want to remain within social acceptability while I do it, so I'm perfectly willing to blunder myself into an absolute trainwreck of a marriage as long as it means we get to screw within the next 24 hours." While early films are notoriously bad at conveying romance on screen, this one is definitely at the head of the pack. The romantic angle just makes no sense, and there's nothing the actors could have done to sell it, in my opinion. What can I say though, in the end I did enjoy this movie a fair bit, not in SPITE of it being conventionally horrible but BECAUSE of it. It's perverted beyond belief without trying to be, while being thoroughly oblivious to that fact. What's not to love? Astaire's dancing is of course always entertaining by its own merit as well.

Reedmalloy I'm sitting here watching our Fred, clad as a Naval aviator, about to fly off to war in a B-17 at the conclusion of "The Sky's the Limit." Navy guy, B-17, that doesn't compute, but hey, it's the movies! There's young Joan Leslie now blowing him a kiss as he flies off. Pretty typical World War II stuff for RKO.As a movie buff, you've got to give Fred credit for trying to be relevant. Yet it's amusing to read reviews and discussion threads on here regarding "The Sky's the Limit" preaching their "disgust" and how "disturbed" the reviewers are because they know, having learned to read (an accomplishment in our day and age), that he was 44 at the time and she "just" 18. (It's also amusing how we choose our modifiers in the context of and to bolster the points we're trying to make but abandon them like a dead-beat dad when it doesn't suit us!) At one point he's called a "creepy old man stalking" Joan by a poster whose icon seems a better illustration of the point. Yet being an optimist, I am at least glad that these all-knowing judges of society, presumably born in the X generation or later, aren't damning the movie for being shot in hideous and unbearably ancient black-and-white.Okay, Fred's too old for the character, I'll grant you that. Fighter pilots, even former Flying Tigers, were young guys. Most American WWII fighter pilots were a year or two on either side of 21. It was a youngster's game. The pilots in the AVG were somewhat older because they were recruited from the pre-war military, but even most of them hadn't yet seen 30 when the Flying Tigers were disbanded a few months before this film was made.Joan, otoh, always looked a little older than she really was until she crossed that line in moviedom where, like Paulette Goddard, she was then cast as women much younger than she really was. That's how Hollywood was in those days. She was cast for her bubbly personality. She was a persona. Notice in "High Sierra" she wasn't cast in the Ida Lupino role (Ida being 23 to Bogie's "creepy old" 42). Of course, nobody tried to cast Fred as Roy Earle, either--wouldn't that have been a hoot? A dancing gangster!And that's the point. Nobody was billed by their ages or cast because of them. They were who they were. Fred may have been "too old" for his character, but he couldn't do "Holiday Inn" any more, made just one year before, because of the war. With the families and friends of 15 million in the war as an audience for movies, the times demanded relevance, and give him credit for being relevant. "The Sky's the Limit" wasn't intended to be a May-December story--that's YOUR take on it. (Sorry, can't italicize on this board.) He wasn't trying to be Bogie to Audrey Hepburn's Sabrina, or Gary Cooper to Audrey Hepburn's Ariane Chavasse, Grace Kelly's Amy Kane or Suzy Parker's Kate Drummond (of course Suzy was cast in a role she was 6 years TOO OLD for, so that's okay). Btw, Coop' was a helluva guy, no? Lighten up. Director Edward Griffith wasn't promoting dirty old men. Anybody who could dance like Fred was pretty much ageless anyway. It was an interesting, even good flick. If you got distracted, you missed a good one. No screeds here from me about "ageism," although hearing it come out of the mouths of the PC crowd is pretty hilarious.One more thing, completely off point. To the reviewer who chastised the lack of credibility for editing in "World War I" footage of a bi-plane being shot down by our hero in the opening sequence, that was actual footage of a Japanese fighter, over China, being shot down, just a few years before the film was made. It's well known to afficionados of aviation in that era. Cheers!

krdement This is a film that I saw for the first time today on TCM, and I am glad that I saw it. Knowing TCM, it will be some time before I have another opportunity. But it also will be some time before I am interested in seeing it again. Other commentators have commented on the film's strong points: some nice sets, great music, Benchley's befuddled speech and Astaire's "One for My Baby" song-and-dance routine.While I am a huge fan of Ginger Rogers, I was impressed by Joan Leslie's all-round performance as Astaire's co-star. She was apparently an extremely versatile talent - remember this is Gary Cooper's girlfriend in Sergeant York! The script placed some rather heavy demands on her character, and she delivers on all counts. It is difficult to portray a character walking the emotional tightrope of falling in love with somebody who apparently has values that you find unacceptable. Joan Leslie handles the chore admirably, focusing on her efforts to reform Astaire.Fred's character was a bust, however - but not necessarily because of his acting. He is poorly cast as a veteran of the Flying Tigers. In his first couple of scenes, he doesn't capture with authenticity a pilot in the dire circumstances that beset those beleaguered, heroic volunteers. Later he jumps off a train, abandoning a military good- will tour to pursue a good time on his own. Though less than noble, his actions are understandable. In short order, he ends up in New York, meets Joan, and begins to woo her. And that is when the movie starts to break down. As one commentator notes, the audience is never sure why Fred doesn't disclose his identity to Joan.His character is never portrayed with any clarity. He doesn't really seem connected to the war. The calendar he marks, seems to have no greater significance than to indicate the number of days he has left to pursue Joan. And that's where the script really betrays us. When does Fred transition from a desire to have a good time to a genuine affection (and eventually, love) for Joan? What prevents his telling her who he is? The fact that none of this is ever made clear is the downfall of an otherwise good movie.The only way I can explain Astaire's character to my own satisfaction is this: When he first meets Joan, he believes that as an aspiring photojournalist, she may shine an unwanted spotlight on him, depriving him of the freedom (and anonymity) to enjoy some time on his own, which is what motivated him to jump off the train. But that is never suggested by the film, itself. Instead he just waffles - agreeing to go on job interviews that he then sabotages, potentially placing her reputation in some jeopardy and also undermining her affections for him. These issues are really just swept under the carpet.In the middle of WWII, the movie did not settle for a "final" happy ending. Joan and Fred, finally do profess their love for each other, but Fred is on his way back into combat. So, the final shot of a tearful Joan is great: In a rush she is fulfilled, worried and hopeful. But Astaire's return is not to be taken for granted. This ending is realistic and cause for reflection, and consequently in odd juxtaposition to the rest of the film. If the entire film had captured more of the complexities personified by Joan Leslie in the last scene, it might have been a true classic. As it stands, Joan Leslie's nice performance, the songs, Astaire's amazing glass- smashing dance and Benchley's monologue are the best things about this movie.

tonyfrontino The film was a fun for the eyes and ears. The opening sense of the film is in error. The shooting down of the Japanses plane was to be a Zero. The plane is a biplane, not a Zero. I truly like black and white film. It adds to the lighting technique. Fred Astire is a master at dance and song. He makes any co-star shine. The movie is a blessing compare to the movies make today. I am glad that these type of film are saved. Thank you to great channels as AMC and TNT to continuing to show these movies. I found it hard to go to the movies today, without problems. Watching the old movies at home is a blessing. Thank you for website like IMDb to research the old movies.