Clubs in Film: The Thackeray Club in 'Top Hat' (1935) with Fred Astaire

The popular image of clubs is very much defined by their portrayal in books, film and television. In the case of the visual arts, the fact that film & TV cameras were not allowed to film inside clubs until the 1960s meant that the abiding impressions were usually of studio sets - and not particularly accurate ones.

One prominent example is in the opening scene of Top Hat (1935), one of the most-loved of the popular Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musicals.

The three-and-a-half-minute Thackeray Club scene which begins Top Hat (1935). You can play the scene by clicking above.

In barely over three minutes of screentime, the fictional Thackeray Club wheels out just about every Clubland trope imaginable: a stuffy atmosphere, cigars-and-pipe-smoking, copies of The Times, an oversized fireplace, glasses of port, a zealously-guarded silence rule.

It is also not terribly accurate.

The Pandro S. Berman design, inside and out, owes much to the imagination of RKO’s design department, who were unrivalled at abstract art deco. But it has little to do with the design of any London club of the era. (The closest would be the Lansdowne Club, which has some art deco sections, but which only opened on 1 May 1935 - one month after Top Hat started filming.) The furnishings, too, are either over-the-top antiques, or far-too-new-looking armchairs.

Even the plaque with the name and foundation date is incongruous. William Makepeace Thackeray - assuming it was named after him - had only just died on Christmas Eve in 1863. The idea that a club named after an individual would be launched within months of his death would have raised eyebrows in Victorian London. After all, the Garrick Club was not launched until David Garrick had been dead and buried for 52 years, and the Savage Club claimed a lineage to poet Richard Savage, who had died 114 years earlier. If this club had been launched in 1864, it would most likely have been part of the 1860s wave of “Junior” clubs like the Junior Carlton (which coincidentally launched that very year), and would have included the “Junior” prefix in its name.

There is another reason to be suspicious of this Thackeray Club: for a club with a supposedly literary identity, there is a curious lack of any visible books. In fact, the only reading material seen on the premises (apart from the signage) are the newspapers that members hide behind.

The idea of a “Silence” rule is also hugely exaggerated. It has long been a popular staple for its comic possibilities of clubs shown in films, from Around the World in 80 Days (1956) to Carry On Regardless (1961) - not to mention depictions of the Diogenes Club, from the original 1893 short story ‘The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter’, to screen adaptations of it, such as in Sherlock (2012).

But London clubs were, by and large, gregariously sociable places, even by 1935, when stagnation had already set in. True, some clubs had a library or a reading room where silence was strictly observed, but this was the exception, not the rule, on the rest of the premises. Clubs have always, first and foremost, been about socialising and conversation.

And this is a confused mish-mash of a portrayal. It has the furniture of a Drawing Room, but the manners of a Library.

The mode of dress is also incredibly confused. The members seen going in are all wearing White Tie and tails - which would have been plausible if there were some sort of function on, but no London club has ever had a general dress code of White Tie, even if there was an unspoken convention for White Tie at dinner. Inside, we see all the members lounging in this Drawing Room in their White Tie - except for Fred Astaire, who is in Black Tie (presumably to make him look/feel more like a fish-out-of-water), along with the waiters.

I am assuming this is an early screen depiction of reciprocation: Astaire’s American character, visiting London, is clearly ill-at-ease and unfamiliar with the London Club. Yet he enjoys all the access of a member, unaccompanied; and Edward Everett Horton’s character asks the porter, “Has Mr. Jerry Travers come in yet?”, only to be told, “Yes, sir, he’s been waiting for you the entire evening, sir.”

The staff and their mannerisms, though played for laughs, are reasonably accurate, with their keeping tabs on each member. The members are noted for their hostility, though this is mainly to illustrate the fastidious silence observed in the Club.

It makes for an entertaining opening to a classic musical - but not an especially accurate screen portrayal.

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Incidentally, this wasn’t Fred Astaire’s only onscreen brush with Clubland. In the 1953 musical The Band Wagon, he is seen wearing a red-and-black hatband of the New York club The Brook - where he was a member in real life, from 1943 until his death. It can be seen in the below clip. (The Brook’s club colours have changed since then.)

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