I haven't seen a bottle since the Spanish-American War

Tonight 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.

She sees more than scenery, as he had always known

A quiet evening with cats and lemon ice. There is real snow crusted in the streets outside, glittering under the LED streetlights that look like stage lighting or movie sets, high-definition backlots. greygirlbeast recently mourned the loss of the "baby aspirin light" of sodium-vapor lamps, the smudge-orange light pollution of my childhood. It certainly changes the color of the overcast sky. And the light that reflects through an apartment at night.

1. Steven Moffat on the new season of Sherlock in a post-Brexit, post-Trump world: "If fiction has a role to play in this, and I'm not such a fatuous oaf that I think it really does, I think we have to start saying what being a hero constitutes. Being a hero isn't being bigger, richer, more powerful than somebody else. It's being wiser and kinder . . . I think it's time for the less-of-a-dick Sherlock." My first and totally uncharitable reaction: if Moffat has finally gotten through his head that it is possible for a person to be both a brilliant human being and not a total jerk, then that's no small step in his own character development, since he has appeared embarrassingly impervious to the concept for years. Also, I might actually watch the new season. Or I might just see if my mother still has tapes of Jeremy Brett.

2. Long-form journalism exists and this is one of the things it looks like: Ta-Nehisi Coates' "My President Was Black."

3. The Smithsonian considers how American journalists covered the rise of Hitler and Mussolini. Matthew Cheney did something similar a few days after the election. Consensus: our track record is pretty terrible.

4. Oh, good: I'm not the only person wondering where the Democrats collectively went. Anybody got newer information since?

5. Coutesy of moon_custafer: humpback whales breaching to feed from a bubble net or the kin of Leviathan rising at the end of days, your call.

I am listening to a lot of Tanglefoot lately, thanks to ladymondegreen. I did not remember until it came around on the iTunes that I had heard "Vimy" once before, in high school: none of the verses were familiar to me, but the haunting twist of the chorus was suddenly there like a nightmare I'd forgotten. You'll die in Kenora, Billy—you, Jim, in Winnipeg. And I will end my days in Montreal. As a result I have played it about two dozen times since yesterday. I think I must have run into it on the radio; it reminds me of the first time I heard Phil Och's "Crucifixion," which could have haunted me for years with one line and the chorus if my parents hadn't owned almost all of his records on vinyl. For somewhat less spooky reasons, "Awkward Donald" and "Secord's Warning" are also stuck in my head. New music is a good thing.