Making Love to Ginger Rogers

"He made love to me," pouts Ginger Rogers in a strange little moment in the 1935 movie Tophat, explaining to her friend why she feels misled by Fred Astaire. That line almost shocked me into supposing that Ginger meant what we would mean by that today, but Tophat was made too late for the line to qualify as a bit of "Pre-Code Hollywood" realism. In fact in 1935, "make love" could still signify any degree of physical involvement, most often just kissing, which the storyline makes pretty clear is all Ginger meant.