Erik Rhodes played the same excitable Italian in both his Astaire and Rogers pictures, a man who cannot get an English sentence to the end intact. It lands cleanly in one film and wears thin in the other. He did one thing, and did it well.
Fi1m perspective
In The Gay Divorcee (1934), Rodolfo Tonetti has been hired to be caught with Ginger Rogers so that she can get her divorce, and he has been given a password to identify himself. It is a line about chance and fate. He cannot get it right. Erik Rhodes plays him as a man who believes each mangled version is the correct one and is hurt when nobody responds, and every scene he is in moves faster than the ones on either side of it. It is the best thing we have seen him do on screen, and he had already done it on stage.
He arrived in Hollywood with the part in his luggage. Born Ernest Sharpe, he began on Broadway in 1928 in A Most Immoral Lady, moved into musicals, and took the name Erik Rhodes for Gay Divorce on Broadway in 1932 and in London in 1933. RKO brought him west in 1934 to play Tonetti again when the show became a film, and Mark Sandrich, who directed it, cast him the following year as Alberto Beddini, the dressmaker in Top Hat (1935). After that came supporting parts to the end of the decade, A Night at the Ritz (1935) and On Your Toes (1939) among them, then war service as an Army Air Force language specialist, then Broadway again and television, including a Perry Mason in 1961. The accent was put on by a man who had studied modern languages at university. He knew exactly what he was doing to English.
The trouble with a speciality is that studios keep ordering it. Beddini is Tonetti with a tape measure: hyperactive, continental, unable to finish a sentence in the language he started it in. In The Gay Divorcee the broken English belongs to the plot, because Tonetti is a professional pretending to be a lover and the wrong password is the pretence coming apart. In Top Hat it is a running gag with nothing under it, and Sandrich lets it run. We laughed at Tonetti and sat stony-faced through Beddini, and the reason is simple: the second film gave him the accent and nothing else to do with it, while Helen Broderick got the jokes.
He belonged to a troupe. Edward Everett Horton and Eric Blore appear in both films alongside him, and each of them also did one thing, but Blore's valet who calls himself "we" is quiet enough to surprise every time, and Rhodes was never allowed to be quiet. Start with The Gay Divorcee, where the joke is still his and the film speeds up when he enters. Then Top Hat, for the dances, and watch the man in the corner do exactly the same thing while the picture has moved on to better material. Hollywood asked him for it for the rest of the decade, and then it stopped asking.
Biography
Erik Rhodes (born Ernest Sharpe) was an American actor and singer. He made his Broadway debut in 1928 under his birth name and first used the stage name Erik Rhodes in the 1932 musical Gay Divorce, in which he originated the role of Rodolfo Tonetti.
He reprised the part in the 1934 film adaptation The Gay Divorcee and appeared as Alberto Beddini in Top Hat (1935), both with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Rhodes studied at the University of Oklahoma and served as a language specialist in the US Army Air Force during the Second World War. He continued working in Broadway musicals and on television into the 1960s.
