Birthday Boy: Everybody Dance Now

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In honor of the great man's 121st birthday, let's spend a few moments in the unsettling company of Mr. Busby Berkeley.

Shameless Saturday Camp Explosion: Dream, Girls

The death this week of Tony Martin, MGM crooner and serial star-marryer (if two - Alice Faye and Cyd Charisse - can put him in that rank; it's not like he's a Mdivani or anything), provides the excuse for this week's SSCE.  It's less obscure than most to date, but instead an opportunity to see what the very toppest-of-the-top in Hollywood could pull off when no expense was spared, and how Metro did things differently.

Integrating the number into the story, for one thing:  this is the first big moment in Ziegfeld Girl, giving some stage time to all three of the picture's heroines:  Hedy Lamarr, Lana Turner, and Judy Garland (we catch a bit of the last two in the dressing room right at the beginning - maybe Hedy was already off dealing with her imposing headpiece).  It makes it clear that Hedy and Lana are in it for the glamour, to be Real Ziegeld Girls (eventually, one flies and one falls), but that Judy has Talent (you can tell because she's one of the dancers, as opposed to being a showgirl, the most elite of whom didn't even have to walk).  It also means that she trades a stunning Adrian gown (just look at Hedy in hers - it's what she was born to wear!) for what is essentially a tinsel poncho, but there you go - it's the singers and dancers, if they're lucky, who become the biggest stars.  Just ask Miss Brice.

The other MGM difference, of course, is scale - no other studio could pull together all the resources required to do so much, so lavishly, so consistently.  Warner's went big with its Gold Diggers numbers in the mid-30s (it is, after all, where Mr. Busby Berkeley, at the helm on this movie, learned his trade), but had pretty much passed on large-scale musicals by this time (1941, by the bye).  RKO had taste and glamour, and certainly their big numbers (think Fred and Ginger) are ravishing - but few were sustained spectacles like this.  Paramount had fun, but couldn't throw this many stars into one mix - Bing Crosby pictures didn't need a raft of leading ladies the way this story did.  Fox never had taste, and the sustained tone of this number is utterly beyond the studio's reach - Zanuck's boys would inevitably have thrown in a dance break for the Albertina Rasch troupe or a Dubious Comedy Interpolation from the likes of the Ritz Brothers or worse.  After that there's pretty much only the also-rans, like Universal (which mostly dispensed with big numbers in favor of The Many Moods of Deanna Durbin) or Columbia, which had Ann Miller for fun and Rita Hayworth for glamour, but did all of it on the cheap.  Of what's left, the less said the better.  Anybody up for a Vera Hruba Ralston tap number over at Republic?

No, this is pretty much the State of the Art, MGM at its MGMiest: vast staircases, lush orchestrations, armies of Beautiful Girls, and fabulously demented costumes (look out for Eve Arden at about 5:00, managing not to look too mortified in one of the most celestially ludicrous, a Moderne explosion in an angora factory).  Adrian clearly relished these opportunities - who else could have come up the passementerie madness that precedes Miss Arden?

Over it all soars the voice of Tony Martin, a slick '40s update to the traditional Irish tenor.  Watching him, I can see why he was a better fit for Charisse than for Faye - he's a bit too solemn for the Girl from Tenth Avenue, a little too replete with self-regard (something I've always thought, too, however divine she was in Singing in the Rain, about La Cyd, so they worked).   He was originally meant to be a kind of singing Gable, and if that didn't quite come off over the long haul, he's still a pleasure to watch here.

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...

Incomprehensible Headline of the Day

What? Is he a temperamental alcoholic perfectionist? Does he make Judy Garland cry? Does he help rationalize the stardom of Esther Williams?

No (although I would kill for a picture of Obama with Esther Williams, for no particular reason). It seems that, to the august London Daily Telegraph, Barack Obama may be a dangerous demagogue because...

He cheers people up.

Well, all I know is one thing.

If there's just the vaguest chance that his inauguration will look even the slightest like this, my vote is totally more sewn up this morning than it was up 'til now.

My Forgotten Man

It suddenly occurred to me, after all that, that you might like a look for yourself.

Blessings on YouTube, for here it is: The "Remember My Forgotten Man" number, complete with the abrupt ending that must have startled filmgoers more used to cozy fadeouts in the style of 42nd Street.

Seven minutes that prove that even the silliest things (30s backstagers directed by Busy Berkeley, for example) can achieve the sublime. Anyone who doesn't get a chill from Etta Moten's singing and the war/breadline section isn't sentient.

"Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?"; "The Boulevard of Broken Dreams"; this song - the 30s certainly had a way with pop songs in minor keys, no?

Women on the Verge

Mr. Muscato has been traveling this week, so I've been spending my evenings revisiting some old favorite pictures (there are only so many he'll put up with, and God knows he puts up with enough else that I don't say a word).

In any case, last night at the Living Room Rivoli, I took in Gold Diggers of 1933.

It's one of those movies I'm still surprised to be able to see any time I take out the DVD. It was very late to video, and I first encountered it back on 57th Street at the Biograph, one of the last really first-rate art houses in New York - a theatre large and lavish enough that it approximated what it might have been like to go to the movies in 1933.

It's a pretty amazing film - definitely worth a look if it's been a while since you've seen it. It's set, no surprise, in the world of Warner' Broadway backstagers, but it has a genuine edge: the one-two punch of Depression and Prohibition, both fairly explicitly addressed, makes it seem far harder-boiled than I remembered. It's about people who are just this side of hungry and making the best of it, even if it means a little casual theft, flashing a little more than ankle to get a job in the chorus, or taking a rube for the ride of his life.

It uses many of the usual thirties bits (the eccentric producer, the lovestruck juvenile-with-a-secret, Ruby Keeler's patented wide-eyed baby act, et al), but adds its own fillips. The optimism of the opening "We're in the Money" number is immediately undercut when bailiffs arrive to seize the sets and costumes, throwing our heroines out of work and setting the plot in motion.

Aline MacMahon's gold digger, a comic actress looking for her next break, is genuinely predatory, and may or may not be redeemed by genuine affection for her mark at the end. She and Ginger Rogers spar over said mark with real viciousness (and a swift kick under a nightclub table). The girls have among them only enough good clothes for one to run after a producer who may or may not have some jobs to hand out. Even Ruby Keeler gets a petulant moment or two, as well as very clearly understanding - and enjoying - the subtext built right into any number called "Pettin' in the Park."

But most of all, it has "My Forgotten Man." This is the musical number as sociology, a truly chilling combination of spectacle and politics that decries the lot of the working men (and the women who loved them) betrayed by the country's economic collapse. It's like an inversion of the earlier numbers, with flirting couples and lighthearted tap dancing replaced by vignettes of humiliation and poverty and the marching of men in breadlines and off to war.

The song builds from a quiet start, first in recitative delivered by a stock "girl of the streets" type, leaning against her lamppost. Then it's taken up as a blues wail, a song of pain and want (sung, it turns out, by one Emma Moten, who later went on to be Gershwin's chosen Bess and a prominent civil-rights activist*). Finally, it's shouted by a mostly male chorus, accompanied by scenes that startlingly combine the stagy - it's a number in a show, after all, so we see the turntable and other stage machinery - and realistic, including battle casualties with more realistically gory injuries than any actual war movie of the era. It's a slap-in-the-face reminder of how difficult and dangerous the early 30s really were, and it's the last thing we see, for the plot gets tidied out of the way so thoroughly we don't even get a last glimpse of the (now successful, employed, married) characters.

In the middle of both the golddigging plot and this climactic number is Joan Blondell, who is as always an unalloyed pleasure.

She's the human face of golddigging, a girl perfectly capable of making her way in the world, but whose sense of self is unshakable enough to know she has a price, and it's more than she's being offered by the stage-door Johnnys and predatory Brahmins she's met on Broadway.

In any case, it's a good night at the movies. What do you suppose Hollywood will make of this emerging global financial meltdown?

* The numbers of the show-within-a-show are surprisingly diverse: "Pettin' in the Park" takes in a rainbow of flirting couples, and "My Forgotten Man" has players who would look more at home in Dorothea Lange's Depression photos than a Broadway revue. The actual Great White Way was less inclusive; the first integrated cast was still a decade in the future in 1933.