Entry tags:
We haven't got time to be sensible
I am home from seeing Busby Berkeley's The Gang's All Here (1943) at the HFA with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
derspatchel, rushthatspeaks, and ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
skygiants. I had remembered it fondly since 2012, but forgotten that it possesses the dreamlike quality of really weird film where remembering one outlandish sequence means you are forgetting three or four others, in my case including the children's chorus, the fake blackmail, and the entire wartime plot. Despite knowing perfectly well that the film was released in 1943, it had entirely slipped my mind that the pretext for the romance is the chance meeting between soldier James Ellison and showgirl Alice Faye right before he's shipped off to the Pacific to become a war hero, leaving a pining Faye and childhood sweetheart Sheila Ryan behind him. (How important is this love triangle? Berkeley settles it with a conversation half-overheard behind a hedge and the hero's father going off to clarify matters with him offscreen. No kisses, no clinches. No attempts even to shoehorn the romantic leads into the same shot. There are stranger things to spend that film stock on. "You can't keep the children waiting all night.") The fake blackmail is a glorious piece of melodrama staged by society wife Charlotte Greenwood and theatrical producer Phil Baker—old comrades from her "purple past" as a cabaret dancer in postwar Paris—in order to snooker her strait-laced husband Edward Everett Horton into letting daughter Ryan take a turn as a specialty dancer in Baker's new show, also co-starring Faye, which is going up at the homecoming party/war bonds rally in honor of the now-decorated Ellison, who I am afraid really is the least interesting person onscreen. The children's chorus are part of the finale, and it is true that their tiny polka-dotted bustles and bowties and overdubbing by an adult offstage chorus were very arresting in the moment, but I don't actually blame myself for blanking them out because the finale itself is "The Polka-Dot Polka," where Berkeley pulls out all the stops from neon to bluescreen to an actual kaleidoscope effect layered on top of his usual habit of choreographing women to look like one, and it sails right off the edge of Dada into the end titles and there's just not much to say about it except that I had failed to notice the first time around that the film is actually bookended with disembodied singing heads and I am delighted. Carmen Miranda is a joy throughout, even when she's just wearing spangly butterflies instead of the total fruit cargo of a steamship on her head. Benny Goodman looks consistently confused by the lyrics he is required to sing, which is fair, because "Minnie's in the Money" is forgettable and "Paducah" ("If you want to, you can rhyme it with bazooka / But don't pooh-pooh Paducah / It's another name for Paradise") is extremely confusing. Eugene Pallette gets to sing exactly one line in the finale and it is like somebody pulled out the organ stop for "bullfrog."
I love this movie so much and I find it essentially indescribable; none of the above statements are untrue, but they also make the film sound far more rational and conventional than it really is, even by the highly elastic standards of a 1940's movie musical, because the overwhelming impression left by The Gang's All Here is not a pleasant if ultimately disposable romance with good supporting characters and some socko numbers, it's wall-to-wall surrealism and metatheater and camp and above all Technicolor—it was Berkeley's first solo color film and he didn't just costume his actors to take eye-popping advantage, he turns fountains electric pink and argon violet just because he can. The realistic parts of this movie are not very real and they are not pretending to be. The fantastical parts of this movie gauge carefully where the top is and go over it every time. The theatricality of diegetic stage design and the theatricality of extra-diegetic movie sets parallax back and forth through each other like an optical illusion. A surprising number of punch lines are addressed to the fourth wall, as is almost all of Miranda's performance. The giant bananas, people. The giant bananas. The giant strawberries. Charlotte Greenwood's deadpan jitterbugging high kicks. Lipstick-plastered Edward Everett Horton experiencing sexual attraction to a woman ("Nobody's more surprised than I am!") for the first time in his life. Alice Faye's wry, yearning ballad about not getting any with her sweetheart away at war, performed on the most naturally dressed and realistically lit set in the entire movie, which naturally makes it a production number in rehearsal at the Club New Yorker. At one point Tony DeMarco—playing himself, like Goodman and Baker but not for whatever reason Miranda—fires off a volley of furious Italian and is sharply cautioned, "If you don't cut that out, the censors will!" I am amazed that the only actual censorship this movie seems to have suffered was a repositioning of the aforementioned giant bananas: once the scantily clad dancers held them a little higher than groin level, suddenly they weren't as Freudian as they look to everyone else? This movie is on beyond Minnelli. It renders me as incoherent as The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T (1953). I hope to God Wittgenstein saw it at least once in his life. I didn't know where to buy a cold pork pie in Boston, so Rob and I took the Orange Line to Chinatown in the late afternoon and bought a quantity of really fine, fluffy char siu bao from Eldo Cake House, plus some lotus paste with preserved egg for later; I ate my pork bun through "The Lady in the Tutti-Frutti Hat" and it made me feel better about almost everything. See it in a theater, on film if you can; if you can't, I hope a Blu-Ray with a decent color balance at least exists in your country and you have a very large TV. This shower bath brought to you by my tutti-frutti backers at Patreon.
derspatchel, rushthatspeaks, and skygiants. I had remembered it fondly since 2012, but forgotten that it possesses the dreamlike quality of really weird film where remembering one outlandish sequence means you are forgetting three or four others, in my case including the children's chorus, the fake blackmail, and the entire wartime plot. Despite knowing perfectly well that the film was released in 1943, it had entirely slipped my mind that the pretext for the romance is the chance meeting between soldier James Ellison and showgirl Alice Faye right before he's shipped off to the Pacific to become a war hero, leaving a pining Faye and childhood sweetheart Sheila Ryan behind him. (How important is this love triangle? Berkeley settles it with a conversation half-overheard behind a hedge and the hero's father going off to clarify matters with him offscreen. No kisses, no clinches. No attempts even to shoehorn the romantic leads into the same shot. There are stranger things to spend that film stock on. "You can't keep the children waiting all night.") The fake blackmail is a glorious piece of melodrama staged by society wife Charlotte Greenwood and theatrical producer Phil Baker—old comrades from her "purple past" as a cabaret dancer in postwar Paris—in order to snooker her strait-laced husband Edward Everett Horton into letting daughter Ryan take a turn as a specialty dancer in Baker's new show, also co-starring Faye, which is going up at the homecoming party/war bonds rally in honor of the now-decorated Ellison, who I am afraid really is the least interesting person onscreen. The children's chorus are part of the finale, and it is true that their tiny polka-dotted bustles and bowties and overdubbing by an adult offstage chorus were very arresting in the moment, but I don't actually blame myself for blanking them out because the finale itself is "The Polka-Dot Polka," where Berkeley pulls out all the stops from neon to bluescreen to an actual kaleidoscope effect layered on top of his usual habit of choreographing women to look like one, and it sails right off the edge of Dada into the end titles and there's just not much to say about it except that I had failed to notice the first time around that the film is actually bookended with disembodied singing heads and I am delighted. Carmen Miranda is a joy throughout, even when she's just wearing spangly butterflies instead of the total fruit cargo of a steamship on her head. Benny Goodman looks consistently confused by the lyrics he is required to sing, which is fair, because "Minnie's in the Money" is forgettable and "Paducah" ("If you want to, you can rhyme it with bazooka / But don't pooh-pooh Paducah / It's another name for Paradise") is extremely confusing. Eugene Pallette gets to sing exactly one line in the finale and it is like somebody pulled out the organ stop for "bullfrog." I love this movie so much and I find it essentially indescribable; none of the above statements are untrue, but they also make the film sound far more rational and conventional than it really is, even by the highly elastic standards of a 1940's movie musical, because the overwhelming impression left by The Gang's All Here is not a pleasant if ultimately disposable romance with good supporting characters and some socko numbers, it's wall-to-wall surrealism and metatheater and camp and above all Technicolor—it was Berkeley's first solo color film and he didn't just costume his actors to take eye-popping advantage, he turns fountains electric pink and argon violet just because he can. The realistic parts of this movie are not very real and they are not pretending to be. The fantastical parts of this movie gauge carefully where the top is and go over it every time. The theatricality of diegetic stage design and the theatricality of extra-diegetic movie sets parallax back and forth through each other like an optical illusion. A surprising number of punch lines are addressed to the fourth wall, as is almost all of Miranda's performance. The giant bananas, people. The giant bananas. The giant strawberries. Charlotte Greenwood's deadpan jitterbugging high kicks. Lipstick-plastered Edward Everett Horton experiencing sexual attraction to a woman ("Nobody's more surprised than I am!") for the first time in his life. Alice Faye's wry, yearning ballad about not getting any with her sweetheart away at war, performed on the most naturally dressed and realistically lit set in the entire movie, which naturally makes it a production number in rehearsal at the Club New Yorker. At one point Tony DeMarco—playing himself, like Goodman and Baker but not for whatever reason Miranda—fires off a volley of furious Italian and is sharply cautioned, "If you don't cut that out, the censors will!" I am amazed that the only actual censorship this movie seems to have suffered was a repositioning of the aforementioned giant bananas: once the scantily clad dancers held them a little higher than groin level, suddenly they weren't as Freudian as they look to everyone else? This movie is on beyond Minnelli. It renders me as incoherent as The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T (1953). I hope to God Wittgenstein saw it at least once in his life. I didn't know where to buy a cold pork pie in Boston, so Rob and I took the Orange Line to Chinatown in the late afternoon and bought a quantity of really fine, fluffy char siu bao from Eldo Cake House, plus some lotus paste with preserved egg for later; I ate my pork bun through "The Lady in the Tutti-Frutti Hat" and it made me feel better about almost everything. See it in a theater, on film if you can; if you can't, I hope a Blu-Ray with a decent color balance at least exists in your country and you have a very large TV. This shower bath brought to you by my tutti-frutti backers at Patreon.
no subject
This sounds so fabulous.
no subject
That is definitely an applicable adjective.
(I think you would like it.)
no subject
no subject
I don't know! I've heard of it but never seen it, and that article makes it sound even weirder than I'd heard.
no subject
no subject
Larry Butler, it looks like. I personally would buy him a hallucinogen in thanks.
no subject
Appropriately enough.
no subject
True!
no subject
no subject
It is that.
no subject
The giant bananas were overwhelming, arresting.
The Charlotte Greenwood character was my favorite thing about the whole film. I mean, she's about seven feet tall, dances like a maniac, has an acid sense of humor and is chill about a guy lifting her ankle to head height and spinning her like a merry-go-round? MY HERO!
It was also my first time seeing Carmen Miranda do anything and I must say I'm impressed. The guy I was with thought she was an offensive stereotype (oversexed Latina, I guess) which I guess is a fair point. She was also a flippin' funny woman. The moment when she has to BE CASUAL and her eyes come out on springs was very relatable. I think it too bad that pop culture only remembers her for the fruit hats. This movie was very strong on funny women.
(I liked the heroine going, "Why don't you stop acting like Don Ameche and get me a taxi?" but I wasn't so fond of the way everything "Casey" did came across like he's a stalker whom she's afraid to give a straight "No" to. If I saw them having their initial conversations in a party I was at, I'd go over and try to cover her escape if she needed one. But if I object to that, I'll have to object to every presentation of romantic attraction in film from "The Wolf Man" up to the present day. Ughhhh.)
The polka dots and flying heads lost me, I'll confess. I accepted everything up till then, including the magic fountain stages and exterior interiors.
What is the significance of the pork pie in connection with Wittgenstein? Side note: there's the Cornish Pasty Co., which does that sort of thing, and pub food in general, on Mass Ave near the river. I got the veg option there recently and it was very good. For all your pork pie needs: http://www.cornishpastyco.com/
no subject
Thank you. You see why it's the kind of movie people need to give affidavits for?
I mean, she's about seven feet tall, dances like a maniac, has an acid sense of humor and is chill about a guy lifting her ankle to head height and spinning her like a merry-go-round? MY HERO!
Charlotte Greenwood is wonderful. I grew up on her as Aunt Eller in Oklahoma! (1955), but then I saw The Gang's All Here and I had to revise my childhood opinion of her significantly upward. She was primarily a stage actress, but she turns up in at least one other Berkeley musical that
It was also my first time seeing Carmen Miranda do anything and I must say I'm impressed.
I think I had seen clips of her prior to this movie, but again, no contest. She is playing a stereotype, but she's also playing it, and she is formidably talented and showing all of it off and at least looks like she's having the time of her life not taking a breath of this plot seriously. Also, you know Dorita's going to make a killing on the stock market when this is all over.
This movie was very strong on funny women.
Yes. And very low on female competition. Alice Faye doesn't even know she's Sheila Ryan's rival until the movie remembers there's supposed to be a love plot going on and then it turns out they were never rivals after all because Busby Berkeley can't be bothered when he has neon hoops and polka dots to stage.
The polka dots and flying heads lost me, I'll confess. I accepted everything up till then, including the magic fountain stages and exterior interiors.
I really love the polka dots and flying heads. Like, technically LSD was discovered the same year The Gang's All Here came out, but Berkeley anticipated psychedelia by at least twenty years.
What is the significance of the pork pie in connection with Wittgenstein?
He used to buy them on his way to the cinema after class and eat them while watching, always in the front row of the theater so that his entire field of his vision was the film. He liked westerns and musicals best. His favorite actresses were Betty Hutton and Carmen Miranda. Apparently movies were one of the very few things that would temporarily shut off the part of his brain that was always thinking critically at him, so that he could get a break from the inside of his own head and just enjoy something. He also really liked crime fiction and would get his American friends to mail him care packages of pulp magazines. It makes sense to me.
Side note: there's the Cornish Pasty Co., which does that sort of thing, and pub food in general, on Mass Ave near the river. I got the veg option there recently and it was very good. For all your pork pie needs
Cool! I'd figured if I wanted a Cornish pasty in this town, I'd have to make it myself. I will definitely check them out.
no subject
I hope to God Wittgenstein saw it --you make me imagine someone setting up a screening at his gravesite, wherever that is.
It sails right off the edge of Dada --reminds me that just this morning Wakanomori showed me XKCD's "Good Cop, Dadaist Cop"
no subject
Thank you!
Vincente Minnelli directed The Pirate (1948), which contains the following pyrotechnic ballet. That isn't a very good transfer, but you get the idea. That is nothing to The Gang's All Here.
--you make me imagine someone setting up a screening at his gravesite, wherever that is.
I mean, there is no reason he couldn't have seen it during his lifetime, since he saw any number of other movies with Carmen Miranda in them; I just don't know for a fact that he did.
--reminds me that just this morning Wakanomori showed me XKCD's "Good Cop, Dadaist Cop"
That's great!
pirate ballet
Re: pirate ballet
I know it won't help if I explain that actually her headgear is designed to recall the ears of a white donkey.
And the greenish people who appear shortly after look very much like aliens--on beyond Minnelli is clearly a VERY wild place indeed.)
It is!