GOLD DIGGERS OF 1933: Blu-ray (Warner Bros./First National, 1933) Warner Archive
The term ‘genius’ gets bandied
about so much these days it is in danger of losing all original meaning. In its
purest form, ‘genius’ is ascribed to someone of exceptional intellect or
creativity. But rarely does a genius possess strengths in both areas. In art,
it is sometimes difficult to label genius – particularly if the abilities in
question appear so extraordinary, they register in the public consciousness as
avant-garde or ahead of their time. The latter generally doesn’t win a lot of
points with the critics either. And genius can sometimes miss its mark with the
paying public too - especially in the collaborative medium of film where credit
and creativity are compartmentalized as components of the creative assembly
line. In Hollywood, today’s genius can quickly become tomorrow’s has-been, a
precarious seesaw balanced on the public’s insatiable need to see something new
– something different – something ‘entertaining’ all the time. As such, one of
the hallmarks of a true creative genius is staying power. What is quite
fashionable today may fall out of favor tomorrow. But if it is truly imbued
with that spark, then it isn’t likely to be forgotten, even if it occasionally
gets set aside. It may also be lampooned or even mocked – the cheapest forms of
flattery. It most certainly will be copied, though arguably never duplicated.
But in the end, genius never dies - revisited, not simply for nostalgia’s sake,
but for an innate fascination and the perennially renewable pleasures it
provides.
Movie lovers label this intangible
quality as ‘magic’. But there really is no word to quantify what the images of
Busby Berkeley have given to us over the generations. From 1930 to 1962
Berkeley dazzled with his confounding geometric kaleidoscopes. During his own
time, Berkeley saw his reputation spectacularly rise and almost as dramatically
crumble, only to be resurrected in the late seventies. By then, Berkeley had
garnered new fans and a newfound respect from both the industry and students
studying his work in film schools. More recently, homages to Berkeley have
appeared in everything from commercials for Daisy sour cream, The Gap and Old
Navy to Disney’s Beauty and The Beast (1991). In fact, his style is so
easily identifiable at a glance, anyone attempting to emulate it is forced to
reference it as having a Berkeley-esque quality. Even the American Thesaurus of
Slang has identified Berkeley’s name as synonymous with ‘any elaborate dance
number.’ All of this lovable nonsense came to Berkeley at a very exacting
price. Frequent co-star, Dick Powell once commented, “Buz usually works in
sweats…and sweats!” And indeed, Berkeley toiled with an almost religious
fervor to achieve his art. And art, it irrefutably remains. Not bad for an
uneducated, brash New Yorker whose stint as a drill sergeant in the army during
WWI would become the inspiration for his second career as a much sought-after
Broadway and Hollywood choreographer. Berkeley’s approach to dance had very
little to do with the dancer as artiste. Some of his harshest critics would
also argue it had absolutely nothing to do with dance - period. But it had
everything to do with the utilization of a dancer’s entire body, often as a
mere cog in a great wheel, performing perfunctory movements, requiring more athleticism
than terpsichorean finesse. Over the
years, some have argued Berkeley had absolutely no talent at all, just a
self-indulgent thirst for industrialized absurdity, making machinery out of the
human form with his camera doing most of the work, his maneuvering minions, simply
that – never achieving a level of individuality on those endlessly rotating
platforms and rising staircases to nowhere.
But Busby
Berkeley never professed himself as a great choreographer. He had even less
interest in extolling the virtues of a dancer’s fluidity and form. A musical
number by Busby Berkeley is really all about Berkeley’s fascination with form
in lieu of content. His numbers are big – gargantuan, in fact – and
mind-bogglingly intricate. One marvels, for example, at the endless rows of
billowy hula-hooped skirts and neon-tubing employed during the staging of The
Shadow Waltz from Gold Diggers of 1933; the way sixty young women,
clutching art deco Stradivariuses, suddenly come together to form one
monumentally massive violin before dissolving into a fluttery army, endlessly
mirrored against impossibly pristine poured-glass and mirror floors. The
Shadow Waltz is perhaps the most perfect musical number ever executed on
celluloid. Most definitely it remains the one to which Berkeley’s own
iconography is forever linked. If it all looks effortless – it wasn’t. Dancers
endured repeated shock from the short-circuiting battery packs hidden beneath
their skirts to power these neon-lit violins. And shooting was interrupted by a
sizable earthquake to chase everyone from the sound stage. But in the end,
nothing could prevent Berkeley from getting his vision up on the screen. The
Shadow Waltz also exemplifies Berkeley’s way of getting ‘into’ a musical
sequence. Start off with a great Harry Warren/Al Dubin song sung by Ruby Keeler
and Dick Powell. Cleverly move in on one dancer, then two - then, suddenly - a
whole army, doing exactly the same thing, the ensemble photographed from every
conceivable angle, and, all of it in service to Berkeley’s dream-like
surrealism.
Today, Busby Berkeley is primarily
known, beloved, occasionally reviled, but most often revered for the ten short
years he spent on the Warner back lot. He has been earmarked in the annals of
Hollywood history for two trends - the aforementioned geometric placement of
his dancers, and, for his equally famed and oft copied overhead crane shot. “Buz
would take his viewfinder high up on a platform in the rafters and be
concentrating so hard on getting the angle just right he’d have to be tied with
a rope around his waist, because a couple a times he almost fell off,”
Mickey Rooney explained. “Everything was in service to that shot,” Ruby
Keeler concurred, “Buz would say ‘stand here’ and I’d stand there. He’s say,
‘do this’ and I’d do it. He wanted things just right for the camera and that’s
all that mattered. How you looked in relation to the shot…but I adored that
man. He was truly gifted.” The Berkeley style is as much an exercise in the
proficient micromanagement of a multitude of chorines as a genuine sense of
finding the collective in the individual through Berkeley’s stunning use of
highly stylized camera movements. Much more than superficial flights into fancy
– at the heart of each frothy confection remains a semisweet center of
conformity bordering on the fascistic – a ‘parade of faces’ oddly alike and
indistinguishable.
In the early years, Berkeley’s
legacy was precariously perched. As a dance director he was restricted to
training dancers and staging routines. After Berkeley began scoring one hit
after another over at Warner Brothers, Samuel Goldwyn, to whom he was under
contract, though under-utilized, attempted – unsuccessfully – to suspend
Berkeley’s release from his contract – claiming he still owed him two pictures.
In the meantime, Mervyn LeRoy, who was a close personal friend and successful
director at Warner Brothers urged Berkeley to stay on in Hollywood, offering to
put in a good word for him with WB’s production chief, Darryl F. Zanuck.
Berkeley was reluctant. Musicals had fizzled all too quickly with the dawn of
sound. As a genre they were now considered passé. Even before his career had
begun, it appeared to be over. But Zanuck had an idea for a ‘new’ kind of
musical; the backstage drama with songs. The result was 42nd Street
(1933). Hot on the heels of that picture’s success, Berkeley hit the ground
running with Gold Diggers of 1933, the extravagance in which he was
given exceptionally free reign and left to his own devices – and vices – to
concoct some of the most breathtaking feats of undiluted escapism yet seen in
the movies. Warren and Dubin kick off
the film with a true oddity of the Depression era, ‘We’re In The Money’
- sung by a sassy Ginger Rogers bedecked in a glittery mass of faux coins. The
song suggests an end to hard times, despite the fact the Great Depression was
at its zenith in 1933. Berkeley employs slow-motion and skewed camera angles as
Rogers and her chorines, flounce rather haplessly about the art deco proscenium
before being interrupted in their rehearsal by bill collectors. This number is
but a prelude to two of Berkeley’s most thrilling confections. ‘Pettin’ In
The Park’ features a pint-sized and slightly perverse Billy Barty skulking
around a lady’s changing room after an impromptu thunderstorm has chased
everyone inside from the art deco park. The number runs the gamut through the
various seasons and is a mind-boggling spectacle of sublime, and ever-so-slightly
perverse pleasure. The girls completely undress as Barty leers on. The number
is impressive not only for its execution but also for its sidestepping of the
newly instituted Production Code that absolutely forbade sexual explicitness of
any kind on the screen. Yet, Berkeley manages to get up close and personal with
his female chorines, shooting from angles that go right up their stocking legs
from ankle to inner thigh, and later, by concealing their naked forms behind
the flimsiest of translucent screens.
If the number remains slightly
risqué, even by today’s standards, Berkeley’s other memorable contribution ‘The
Shadow Waltz’ is anything but, and one of the undisputed highlights to
emerge from Depression-era Hollywood. Now, the chorines are redressed in
tri-hooped billowy satin white skirts, coddling neon-lit violins. Midway
through shooting this elephantine production number the studio was rocked by a
6.4 magnitude earthquake whose epicenter in Long Beach rattled Burbank to its
core. The set was plunged into darkness and several of the dancers were injured
by falling debris. Berkeley, thirty-feet up in the rafters at the time, clung
perilously to his rigging while encouraging the frightened dancers to remain
where they were until the gigantic bay doors could be pried open to allow in the
natural light. Thankfully, damage to the set and the studio were minimal – a
minor miracle, even if it delayed shooting by a few days, in order to assess
structural damage. When the company did reassemble, Berkeley dove headstrong
into the film’s penultimate number, Remember My Forgotten Man, a
Depression-era dirge/anthem to the impoverished masses, featuring Joan Blondell
talking her way with considerable emotion through a great Warren/Dubin song to
squarely addresses the economic devastation of the times. The song is an
uncharacteristically potent social commentary - pure Berkeley’s vision of it,
no less so, the foreground cluttered with panged, expressionless eyes - the
backdrop, a fascinating bridgework of soldiers proudly marching across a
rainbow-like proscenium as Blondell passionately implores the audience to never
forget the men who made sacrifices for freedom.
At a time when movies in general, and musicals in particular, all but
ignored the nation’s woes, choosing instead to divert audience’s anxieties with
escapist fluff and nonsense, Berkeley brought the Depression front and center,
and, to a fevered pitch – boldly, concretely and with immeasurable artistic
flair, making it the focus of his narrative.
As with other Berkeley shows, the
plot to this movie is far less interesting than its numbers, perhaps because
the story portions were almost always directed by somebody else. In Gold
Diggers of 1933, we get Mervyn LeRoy – decidedly, no slouch. And, to be
sure, the screenplay by Erwin S. Gelsey and James Seymour, with additional dialogue
from Ben Markson and David Boehm is a cut above the usual nonsense to provide
bare connective tissue between Berkeley’s psychedelic exoticism. Herein, the tale is of four aspiring
actresses, the ingenue, Polly Parker (Ruby Keeler), touch singer, Carol King
(Joan Blondell), comedian, Trixie Lorraine (Aline MacMahon), and, Fay Fortune
(Ginger Rogers), pure cheesecake with sass to burn. After the girls’ hopes for a new show are dashed
by some pesky bill collectors, Polly, Carol, and Trixie find themselves as ‘guests’
of producer, Barney Hopkins (Ned Sparks), who overhears Brad Roberts (Dick
Powell), the girls' neighbor and Polly's boyfriend, playing the piano. Brad, a
brilliant songwriter/singer offers Hopkins $15,000 to back a show. Brad’s serious,
but his philanthropy ends there. Despite his formidable talents, he refuses to
partake of the venture any further. Speculation runs rampant, Brad is involved
in organized crime. How else could he foot the bills? Actually, he is the son
of a millionaire who absolutely forbids him any involvement in the legitimate
theater.
The show progresses and aims to be
a big hit until the juvenile lead, Don Gordon (Clarence Nordstrom) suddenly
develops a bad back and bows out, just before opening night, leaving Brad to
step into the spotlight. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Eventually,
news of Brad’s debut reaches his elder brother, J. Lawrence Bradford (Warren
William), who conspires with the family’s attorney, Faneuil ‘Fanny’ H. Peabody
(Guy Kibbee) to prevent Brad from being seduced by a gold digger. Larry
mistakes Carol for Polly and tries to buy her off. Rather predictably, the two
fall in love. As Polly and Brad are allowed to persist as ‘an item’, this
leaves Trixie open to make her mark on the hoi poloi with Fanny. When Lawrence
finds out Polly and Brad have eloped, he threatens to have their marriage annulled.
Mercifully, cooler heads prevail. Carol refuses to wed Larry unless he drops
the whole thing, and Trixie and ‘Fanny’ eventually chart their own course for the
altar. Everyone except Fay, who ironically sang ‘We’re in the Money’ at
the outset of our story, winds up with a rich beau.
On the heels of 42nd
Street, audiences and critics were expecting something utterly spectacular
from Berkeley…and that’s just what they received in Gold Diggers of 1933.
In every way, Berkeley tops his previous effort with a dazzling array of wildly
inventive musical numbers. The intricacies involved in bringing Berkeley’s dream-like
visions to life have, arguably, never been topped since his time. And while one
may argue those hallucinatory confections have little or nothing at all to do
with the art of dance, they absolutely have everything to do with the meticulous
craftsmanship of bringing a cinematic perspective to bear on what was, until
Berkeley’s time, a rather statically staged artform. The Hollywood musical would
achieve more colorful extremes in the coming decades. But Berkeley, in B&W,
illustrates why his clear-eyed mastery of the cinema space needs no colossus of
embellishment beyond what he lends it, to introduce an escapist world of youth
and beauty, joy and utterly happiness to a world, then, in desperate need of
such escapism at the movies. Boy, could we certainly use someone of Berkeley’s
caliber right about now!
Gold Diggers of
1933 arrives on Blu-ray via the Warner Archive. To date, WAC has been rather
remiss in giving us Berkeley’s best work in 1080p. 42nd Street
was an early Warner Home Video release in 2011, and in 2014, WAC added Footlight
Parade (1933) to their hi-def roster. Now, comes Gold Diggers of 1933.
One can only pray it won’t take WAC another 8 years to start marketing the rest
of Berkeley’s exquisite movie magic on home video. But to the point; Gold
Diggers of 1933 in hi-def looks utterly ravishing. Creamy, dreamy textures
abound, and the scan, done from an expertly curated negative, has been given
all the love and consideration one might anticipate from Warner’s in-house
mastering facility – MPI. So, the results here ought to come as no surprise to
anyone who has purchased at least 2 WAC releases from the past year. WAC is at
the forefront of home video hi-def classic movie preservation and restoration.
We doff our caps again in gratitude for their efforts. The 2.0 DTS mono is
excellent within the inherent limitations of vintage Vitaphone mono recording
technologies of their day. There’s still a briefly static sounding refrain
during The Shadow Waltz. I suspect, this was baked into the original audio
sound mix. Extras have all been ported over from the original DVD release and
include the featurette, ‘F.D.R.'s New Deal: Broadway Bound’, 3 WB
cartoon shorts - I've Got to Sing a Torch Song, Pettin' in the Park,
and, We're In the Money, plus vintage live-action shorts -Rambling
Round Radio Row, The 42nd St. Special and Seasoned Greetings. Bottom
line: of all the Berkeley spectacles, Gold Diggers of 1933 is perhaps
the epitome of this master architect’s chic good taste and visual eclecticism.
The Blu-ray looks spectacular and is a no-brainer add-on to any movie
collection.
FILM RATING (out
of 5 – 5 being the best)
4
VIDEO/AUDIO
4.5
EXTRAS
2
Comments