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I haven't seen a bottle since the Spanish-American War
Tonight ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
derspatchel and I met ladymondegreen for a Busby Berkeley double feature at the HFA: Mervyn LeRoy's Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933) and Ray Enright's Dames (1934). We were capable of coherent speech when we left, but it wasn't for the movies' lack of trying.
I had never seen Dames, which went into production just as the Production Code hit; the censor-baiting plot is resolved nearly as cursorily as the romance in The Gang's All Here (1943), but the musical numbers are delirious. Turn-of-the-century Joan Blondell gets romanced by a pile of lust-animated long johns in "The Girl at the Ironing Board" and Ruby Keeler's face multiplies ad absurd infinitum in "I Only Have Eyes for You," including an enormous photomosaic and Keeler rising out of her own literal iris shot. I hadn't realized the title song came from this movie, but Berkeley rose to the challenge of illustrating its self-referential argument—"Who cares if there's a plot or not when they've got a lot of dames?"—with geometric refractions of ladies in movable beds, ladies in neon-framed baths, ladies in front of endlessly reflecting mirrors, ladies freezing into kaleidoscopes, ladies grinning upside down, a four-sided rotating corridor of ladies . . . I didn't know that was a fetish, I keep thinking as I watch his choreography, but I'm glad somebody filmed it. One of the songwriters for Dick Powell's Sweet and Hot revue is composer Sammy Fain, meta-cameoing with a proud smile for one of the numbers he actually didn't write.1 I think it is a good thing that an entire audience now hisses in reaction to the sunnily defiant line "free, white, and twenty-one." I wouldn't call it first-rank Berkeley, but it's worth it for the weirdness if you get the chance.
I had seen Gold Diggers of 1933 two or three times before, but never in a theater or on film. It's great for the musical staging and Ned Sparks' stoneface. I love Aline MacMahon clawing her way out of her hair in the morning, because I have had mornings like that; Guy Kibbee matching the bemused tongue-out expression of a pug dog in a mirror is a great bit of random improv. The order of songs seems to assume that if you can take Ginger Rogers singing in Pig Latin while wearing nothing more than some differently sized silver dollars, the roller-skating cops and swirling neon violin girls won't faze you a bit.2 More seriously, while I know the planned finale was swapped with an earlier number during production, it was the right choice because there's nothing like the ending of Gold Diggers in another musical of its time. The film opens with the surreal optimism of "We're in the Money," which turns out to be a rehearsal for a show that never opens because the producer's gone broke with the rest of the country; it throws the plate-spinning fun of a backstage comedy into the air and we're encouraged to escapism by the happy ending of wealthy Boston snobs who learn to love Broadway, but reality smacks it all down at the finale, seriously and persuasively, with the explicitly political show-within-a-showstopper "Remember My Forgotten Man." I had not consciously noticed before how much like a WPA poster that final tableau is staged. It's the realization of the show Sparks originally envisioned, hearing Powell noodling bluesily at the piano: "That's it! That's what this show's about! The Depression. Men marching, marching in the rain—doughnuts and crullers—jobs, jobs—and in the background Carol, spirit of the Depression . . . Not a blues song, but a wailing, a wailing, and this gorgeous woman singing a song that will tear their hearts out. The big parade. The big parade of tears!" We just got distracted by ending up in the money after all and the reminder blows the bloody doors off. Etta Moten should have gotten screen credit for her spellbinding singing. First black woman to perform at the White House, Warners, it wouldn't have killed you.
Lady Mondegreen and I are going back on Sunday for Lady Be Good (1941), which promises Eleanor Powell and the Berry Brothers on top of whatever Berkeley can think to do with the Gershwins' music. I have already promised Rob that I will describe it for him, since he is formally envious at having to miss it. (He's working two performances of The Slutcracker at the Somerville Theatre; he tells me that seeing a giant candy-striped penis onstage never gets old, but that cleaning up after a Slutcracker performance is the worst. "Only because they use rose petals!") That leaves me tomorrow to try to sleep and not hallucinate common household objects in the form of kaleidoscopic ladies. This opportunity brought to you by my cinematerpsichorean backers at Patreon.
1. I feel bad about Dick Powell. I got home, looked him up on IMDb, saw that he'd died relatively young—fifty-eight. Oh, damn, I thought, what happened? Then I scrolled down and saw he'd directed The Conqueror (1957). I know it's a legendarily dreadful movie, but Hollywood has produced any number of those and they don't usually require actual death in expiation. The one movie of Powell's I've seen was actually quite good: the late noir Split Second (1953). With hindsight in irony, its climax involves a nuclear blast.
2. Watching nine-year-old Billy Barty playing a baby in "Pettin' in the Park"—peeping on the petting couples, passing Powell a can opener so that he can get through Keeler's tin cuirass—I suddenly realized that if your childhood experience of acting includes Busby Berkeley as just another day on set, then growing up to impersonate Liberace and demolish "That Old Black Magic" with Spike Jones and His City Slickers is a perfectly reasonable career trajectory.
derspatchel and I met ladymondegreen for a Busby Berkeley double feature at the HFA: Mervyn LeRoy's Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933) and Ray Enright's Dames (1934). We were capable of coherent speech when we left, but it wasn't for the movies' lack of trying.I had never seen Dames, which went into production just as the Production Code hit; the censor-baiting plot is resolved nearly as cursorily as the romance in The Gang's All Here (1943), but the musical numbers are delirious. Turn-of-the-century Joan Blondell gets romanced by a pile of lust-animated long johns in "The Girl at the Ironing Board" and Ruby Keeler's face multiplies ad absurd infinitum in "I Only Have Eyes for You," including an enormous photomosaic and Keeler rising out of her own literal iris shot. I hadn't realized the title song came from this movie, but Berkeley rose to the challenge of illustrating its self-referential argument—"Who cares if there's a plot or not when they've got a lot of dames?"—with geometric refractions of ladies in movable beds, ladies in neon-framed baths, ladies in front of endlessly reflecting mirrors, ladies freezing into kaleidoscopes, ladies grinning upside down, a four-sided rotating corridor of ladies . . . I didn't know that was a fetish, I keep thinking as I watch his choreography, but I'm glad somebody filmed it. One of the songwriters for Dick Powell's Sweet and Hot revue is composer Sammy Fain, meta-cameoing with a proud smile for one of the numbers he actually didn't write.1 I think it is a good thing that an entire audience now hisses in reaction to the sunnily defiant line "free, white, and twenty-one." I wouldn't call it first-rank Berkeley, but it's worth it for the weirdness if you get the chance.
I had seen Gold Diggers of 1933 two or three times before, but never in a theater or on film. It's great for the musical staging and Ned Sparks' stoneface. I love Aline MacMahon clawing her way out of her hair in the morning, because I have had mornings like that; Guy Kibbee matching the bemused tongue-out expression of a pug dog in a mirror is a great bit of random improv. The order of songs seems to assume that if you can take Ginger Rogers singing in Pig Latin while wearing nothing more than some differently sized silver dollars, the roller-skating cops and swirling neon violin girls won't faze you a bit.2 More seriously, while I know the planned finale was swapped with an earlier number during production, it was the right choice because there's nothing like the ending of Gold Diggers in another musical of its time. The film opens with the surreal optimism of "We're in the Money," which turns out to be a rehearsal for a show that never opens because the producer's gone broke with the rest of the country; it throws the plate-spinning fun of a backstage comedy into the air and we're encouraged to escapism by the happy ending of wealthy Boston snobs who learn to love Broadway, but reality smacks it all down at the finale, seriously and persuasively, with the explicitly political show-within-a-showstopper "Remember My Forgotten Man." I had not consciously noticed before how much like a WPA poster that final tableau is staged. It's the realization of the show Sparks originally envisioned, hearing Powell noodling bluesily at the piano: "That's it! That's what this show's about! The Depression. Men marching, marching in the rain—doughnuts and crullers—jobs, jobs—and in the background Carol, spirit of the Depression . . . Not a blues song, but a wailing, a wailing, and this gorgeous woman singing a song that will tear their hearts out. The big parade. The big parade of tears!" We just got distracted by ending up in the money after all and the reminder blows the bloody doors off. Etta Moten should have gotten screen credit for her spellbinding singing. First black woman to perform at the White House, Warners, it wouldn't have killed you.
Lady Mondegreen and I are going back on Sunday for Lady Be Good (1941), which promises Eleanor Powell and the Berry Brothers on top of whatever Berkeley can think to do with the Gershwins' music. I have already promised Rob that I will describe it for him, since he is formally envious at having to miss it. (He's working two performances of The Slutcracker at the Somerville Theatre; he tells me that seeing a giant candy-striped penis onstage never gets old, but that cleaning up after a Slutcracker performance is the worst. "Only because they use rose petals!") That leaves me tomorrow to try to sleep and not hallucinate common household objects in the form of kaleidoscopic ladies. This opportunity brought to you by my cinematerpsichorean backers at Patreon.
1. I feel bad about Dick Powell. I got home, looked him up on IMDb, saw that he'd died relatively young—fifty-eight. Oh, damn, I thought, what happened? Then I scrolled down and saw he'd directed The Conqueror (1957). I know it's a legendarily dreadful movie, but Hollywood has produced any number of those and they don't usually require actual death in expiation. The one movie of Powell's I've seen was actually quite good: the late noir Split Second (1953). With hindsight in irony, its climax involves a nuclear blast.
2. Watching nine-year-old Billy Barty playing a baby in "Pettin' in the Park"—peeping on the petting couples, passing Powell a can opener so that he can get through Keeler's tin cuirass—I suddenly realized that if your childhood experience of acting includes Busby Berkeley as just another day on set, then growing up to impersonate Liberace and demolish "That Old Black Magic" with Spike Jones and His City Slickers is a perfectly reasonable career trajectory.
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I don't feel creeped at. I'm glad they're helping! Besides, it means the movies are still fulfilling their original function, even at second hand.
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http://veehd.com/video/4863925_Heat-Lightning-Aline-MacMahon-Ann-Dvorak-Preston-Foster-1934-Golden-Reel-Collection-avi
ALINE MACMAHON IN DUNGAREES AND ENGINE GREASE, and what's either no make-up or a better "no make-up" make-up than I've ever seen from Hollywood of that era, and it's AMAAAAAZING. She does inevitably femme up, but not until the 45-minute mark of a 66-minute movie, and in context because of what it means it makes you terribly afraid for her (and by the end of the film she's largely reverted to her initial appearance again). It feels like a radical act just to have her onscreen and the absolute visual center of the film.
One of the last ever pre-Codes -- it was released and then banned two months later.
Directed by Mervyn LeRoy, who also directed Three on a Match, Gold Diggers of 1933, I Am A Fugitive From A Chain Gang and Johnny Eager, among others.
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Sold: I love Aline MacMahon.
One of the last ever pre-Codes -- it was released and then banned two months later.
An extra point in its favor!
Directed by Mervyn LeRoy, who also directed Three on a Match, Gold Diggers of 1933, I Am A Fugitive From A Chain Gang and Johnny Eager, among others.
You have to see Johnny Eager if you haven't already. (a) I love it (b) it demands a close reading by somebody with more queer theory than me.
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https://cinemavensessaysfromthecouch.files.wordpress.com/2015/07/1934-heat-lightning.jpg
https://cinemavensessaysfromthecouch.files.wordpress.com/2015/06/heat-lightning-xx.jpg
That's what she looks like for most of the film.
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I should clarify that the film as a whole hits at least "very good, worthy of more attention" (and it's definitely a proto-noir, and also female-centric and badass); Aline MacMahon is the AMAAAAAAAZING element. But since she's the centre of the film ...
Thanks for the memory
Re: Thanks for the memory
I have the weird feeling that I knew the song before seeing the film for the first time with my cousins in their old apartment, maybe as much as eight or nine years ago now, but the staging just knocked me sideways. I don't know if I could evaluate it then, but now it looks to me very different from most of Berkeley's work: narrative, theatrical, expressionistic, focused on male bodies instead of female. I should try to read something about the making of the film.
"Only because they use rose petals!"
Re: "Only because they use rose petals!"
That is excellent.
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I have seen clips, but never the whole thing. Thank you for this essay!
ETA: Adding "Faneuil H. Peabody" to list of cat names I must use sometime.
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And they liked Guy Kibbee and the
pugPekinese! That shows taste.(I like ". . . the young musical composer, temporarily known as Brad.")
I have seen clips, but never the whole thing. Thank you for this essay!
You're very welcome. I hope you can see the entire movie sometime!
ETA: Adding "Faneuil H. Peabody" to list of cat names I must use sometime.
One of those longhaired cats with sideburns, I think.
related
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When you say clawing her way out of her hair, I guess you don't mean literally pulling off a wig? And you say it's a feeling you've had... is it the tangled-ness of morning?
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No, you may be distressingly right. Like one of those ring-molded Jell-O salads. Only with knees.
When you say clawing her way out of her hair, I guess you don't mean literally pulling off a wig? And you say it's a feeling you've had... is it the tangled-ness of morning?
Yes—waking in the morning, pulling hair out of her face. It's done as a visual gag so that she initially appears to be sleeping with her face buried in the pillows and her hair loose down her back before her hands come up, but I have still had mornings like that.