Werner Herzog, from On the Ecstasy of Ski-Flying: Werner Herzog in Conversation with Karen Beckman:

“How he moves and how he dances is phenomenal…Fred Astaire..it is somehow something else because it’s so absolutely and crazily stylized, it’s so remote from the real world as you can get. For only ten dollars you can remove yourself from reality as far as you can even imagine. And him singing, ‘Don’t Monkey with Broadway,’ and the way they are dancing, it’s just phenomenal. And the face of Fred Astaire is so enormously stupid. I have never seen a face that projects stupidity in such a bold way as he does. And lines of dialogue and the songs they are singing are so phenomenally stupid, and still I love it and I don’t know why. There’s something very dear to my heart. When I even think about Fred Astaire, I become mellow.”