What Do You Go For?

I've been flying solo these last couple of days, with Mr. Muscato on the road for business. As usual in such situations, I have dived into the voluminous Villa Muscato film archive, taking advantage of temporary bachelordom to catch up on various obsessions that the two of us may not entirely share.

Last night's treat was the comparatively least celebrated of Warner Bros.' run of early thirty musical spectaculars, Dames. There are perfectly legitimate reasons that it doesn't have the stature of, say, 42nd Street or Golddiggers of 1933, but it's still a fine evening's entertainment.

Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler do their usual business (brash and blushing, respectively) quite competently, and Joan Blondell, as always, livens the proceedings. The plot requires Guy Kibbee and ZaSu Pitts, as Keeler's parents, to bumble and dither as is their wont, but Pitts is oddly absent, doing nothing with what is basically a pretty nothing part (she looks like she wishes she were back with Stroheim in Greed).

The real reason for these pictures, of course, isn't the plot, but rather the numbers, and here Busby Berkeley certainly delivers. From an idyllic Central Park setting for the rather treacly "When You Were a Smile on Your Mother's Lips (and a Twinkle in Your Daddy's Eye)" to set the Powell-Keeler romance moving to the title number that highlights the inevitable show-within-a-show, the music moves along briskly. A bizarre Gibson Girl/Gay '90s number, "The Girl at the Ironing Board" gives Blondell the chance to frolic with an entire laundry's worth of en-puppetted long johns (a feint at least in part a result of her advanced pregnancy during filming).

One thing this picture does require is a very high tolerance for the standard that it launched upon the world, "I Only Have Eyes For You," of which one hears a very great deal in the course of the film's 91 minutes. It first appears early in the picture, but then gets the full-fledged demento Berkeley treatment later on, in an extravaganza that imagines the Second Coming as the Apotheosis of Ruby Keeler, or perhaps what Kim Jong Il might get up to if he had an unlimited supply of white organza (and Ruby Keeler). It might seem the last word in Bekeleyiana, but in reality it only sets the stage for the big "Dames" finale, which, like the rest of the best of Berkeley, is basically indescribable.

Actually, it's what Leni Riefenstahl might have done if she'd had better drugs and a sense of humor. In fact, it's odd having seen this movie and the Leni documentary in one week; it causes all sorts of thinking about what was really going on in people's minds in the 1930s.

I've decided that there is a truly fundamental difference between Riefenstahl's massed thousands of perfect Aryans and Berkeley's intricate compositions of giggling Hollywood chorus girls. It's that Leni came out of entertainment (having started as a dancer - of sorts, if the clips available are any indication - and actress) and applied what she had learned there to the glorification of Fascist pomp and circumstance. By contrast, Berkeley took his military-academy background - his love of regimentation, precision, the endless geometric replication of pattern - and applied it to the most basic tropes of show-biz: boy meets girl, kids meet fame (on a soundstage the size of all Burbank, in the company of endless numbers of extras moving in unison).

That is, although in some ways the products seem almost eerily similar, they're actually coming at each other from entirely different universes. One gilds a vacuous evil, giving it a frozen, gimcrack glamor; the other adds a backbone of steel to the June-Moon-Spoon of a thousand nights in Vaudeville, turning it into true cinema that's still, by virtue of its inherent absurdity, gloriously entertaining and oddly human in scale. Surely there can be few less Fascist concepts than 350 dancing Ruby Keelers, let alone having all of them serenaded by the keening croon of the eternal juvenile Dick Powell.

If only he could have done more with poor ZaSu...

Want to be Happy?

If so, even if you've headed back to the chain gang after a too-short long weekend, or are, like us, almost through another week but not quite there yet, watch this video: it will make you happy.

Yes, it's Ruby Keeler, all grown up and decades later, having her late-in-life triumph in No, No, Nanette! She and her chorus are caught here on shaky video that nonetheless makes crystal clear just why, in her day and in her way, the lady was a star. What didn't always work on screen, coming across as stiff or artless, is here transformed into pure charm, the sort of stage charisma that rolls across the footlights in waves of sheer warmth and good cheer. And make no mistake: the lady can dance.

There - don't you feel better, even on Labor Day Tuesday?

Mistaken Identities, First Lady Edition

Of course, I know this is the effervescent Miss Ruby Keeler in her late-in-life triumph in No! No! Nanette! in the early 70s.

But when I stumbled across the image recently, my first thought was that it was Nancy Reagan on one last Happy Pill binge, having her final Helen Lawson moment.

Birthday Artistes

Here's another fairly amazing Birthday Trifecta. The only common thread I can see is a certain talent to amuse, although I suppose it's possible, however unlikely, that they all slept with Al Jolson.

Ladies first, and Ruby Keeler certainly did; she even went the extra mile and married him.


It almost ruined her, even as it made her a national name, and in later interviews she preferred not mentioning him. Sometimes I think it's too bad she's most remembered for her dated tapping and appealingly awkward emoting ("Gee, Mr. Kent - That'd be swell!") on film. She was a stage star, first and last, and tapped her way through her last triumph, in 1971's No, No, Nanette revival.

Next up: Elvis. Costello, that is. To those of us who came of age in 1980 or so, the Real Elvis.

I suppose he shares some of Ruby's geeky charm, but from angry young Attractions frontman to Mr. Diana Krall, he's kept moving on. Madonna gets the all credit for continually reinventing herself, but Costello does it without the hoopla, and in ways that are actually artistically invigorating, meaning he's always This Year's Model.

His collaboration with the divine Anne Sofie von Otter, For the Stars, redeems the whole idea of pop-classical crossover. Buy it now.

And last, the Great American Artist.

No snark possible; Leonard Bernstein was the real deal, and even, as here, in his seventies, a not inconsiderable Attraction himself.

"Polymath" hardly starts to describe a man who was a teacher, composer, conductor, author, activist, philanthropist, and lifelong enfant terrible. Nor does something reductive like "man of contradictions" adequately sum someone so egocentric and all-embracing, so joyous and so dark, so profoundly (and in the best way) moral and so hedonistic.

And no, I don't really think he slept with Al Jolson. Although, God knows, it would have been an interesting night...