By David Raether
Once again, I had failed as a father.
I talked to one of my adult daughters the other day, and I mentioned to her that I was writing a post about Busby Berkeley.
“Who?” she said.
“You’ve never heard of Busby Berkeley?” I asked, incredulous.
“Nope,” she said.
“You mean all those times I brought home all those movies I never once brought home movies like Gold Diggers of 1935 (1935) or 42nd Street (1933)?!”
“I’ve never heard of either of those movies. And I’ve never heard of Busby Berkeley.”
“Well,” I said. “Another item to be added to the list of David’s Failings as a Father.”
“Absolutely!” she said, agreeing with me a little too readily.
Most people seem to have no clue about Busby Berkeley anymore, despite his being a seminal figure in American movie musical history. His trademark is over-the-top, crazy, outrageous numbers that are head (and hip) shakers even to this day.
Musical production numbers always have a certain amount of irreality, regardless of era. Take the opening number of La La Land (2016), for instance. I have been in hundreds of freeway traffic jams in Los Angeles over the years. Not once have people gotten out of their cars and begun singing and dancing. Sure, maybe an occasional fistfight or shooting every so often, but singing and dancing? Sadly, no.
Part of the pleasure of a movie musical is our willingness to accept that people will break into song and dance when that would never, ever happen in real life. Busby Berkeley movie musicals are on a whole other gloriously absurd level altogether.
Berkeley was an unusual choreographer in that he wasn’t particularly interested in how well his dancers could actually dance. His real interest was the overall look of the group of dancers, the geometry of their group performances, and the kaleidoscope of their movements together. He rarely features an individual dancer or a couple. Berkeley’s choreography is almost always about the group—everyone looks the same, and we seldom see their faces. The stages he shot on were enormous and often had the impersonal, strange cityscapes that you would have found in Weimar-era German Expressionism.
“Hold on, mister. What’s with the snobby references to “Weimar-era German Expressionism? I mean, seriously? We just want to rent a fun and entertaining movie. We don’t need you throwing around all this academic stuff.”
My apologies. You stopped me before I got to the Leni Riefenstahl Monumentalism themes in his pictures, which, I think, we can all be grateful for.
Where were we? I can tell you where we aren’t going: the Proto-Fascist design elements of many of his production numbers. Nope, we are certainly not going there.
Let’s step back a bit. The first thing to note about Busby Berkeley movies is that they are outrageously over-the-top and have all the nutritional value of an angel food cake. But they are so much fun! His productions are utterly nonsensical and absolutely irresistible.
What’s that, you say? Did you want something more? No, my friend, this is a Busby Berkeley production. It’s just going to be silly, a lot of fun, and glorious to look at.
There is no question that Berkeley created an utterly singular style when it came to the movie musical. The curious issue is why he is so forgotten nowadays. Just about everyone knows Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, Ginger Rogers, even Jerome Robbins, the choreographer of Oklahoma!
But mention Busby Berkeley, and you’ll mainly get blank stares.
Perhaps it’s partially because his numbers lack warmth and humanity; Berkeley just wasn’t interested in his dancers as anything more than pieces in the giant geometric puzzle he was assembling. He had no star dancers in his numbers—the shapes were the stars. Even in a somewhat conventional 1950s musical number like Carmen Miranda’s The Lady in the Tutti Frutti Hat, Miranda only appears in about half of the number. The rest of it is given over to a chorus line of dancers working with six-foot-tall styrofoam bananas. Is it entertaining? Absolutely. But what is it? Hard to say, really. I showed this number to my wife, and she was smiling throughout the entire thing. When it was over, she had one question: “What is the point he is making?”
No one knows, my dearest. No one knows.
Busby Berkeley was born on November 29, 1895 in Los Angeles, into a theatrical family. His mother was an actress, and his father ran a theater company. By 22, he was in the U.S. Army, serving in Europe during World War I. Berkeley had attained the rank of field artillery lieutenant and was tasked with training soldiers in close order marching. It was during this time he began to experiment with ornate marching drills. His first dancers were soldiers. They were merely elements of a complicated marching pattern he had designed for upwards of 1,200 men, nothing more.
After the war ended, he returned to Los Angeles and its emerging film industry and found work as a choreographer. His choreography was always spectacular and distinctive, often bearing no relationship to the film or the story being told. With the arrival of the Great Depression, Berkeley’s light-hearted and outrageous production numbers came to be beloved by audiences who were largely overwhelmed by the sorrows of the day. In fact, he went out of his way to deny any deep significance or underlying meaning to his work.
Film critic David Kehr, writing in The New York Times in 2005, had this to say about Berkeley’s movies:
“For Berkeley, one of the oddest and most original talents to work in Hollywood, every movie is about the creation of a universe—his own. Using purely mechanical means, he constructed a free-floating dream world, where space can expand and contract at will (like those cramped nightclub stages that open up to the size of a football field); human figures arrange themselves into complex geometric patterns, and a constantly moving camera finds ever more bizarre and vertiginous angles on the action.”
Busby Berkeley was, by all accounts, a pretty terrible person, though. He was married six times, and in 1935, probably should have been convicted of some form of murder for driving his car head-on into another car late one evening on Pacific Coast Highway after his usual bout of drinking martinis in his bathtub. He killed two people in the other car and critically injured three others.
Interest in his largely forgotten work was suddenly revived in the late 1960s and early 1970s by a new generation of fans who found its campiness appealing. He was hired to make a Busby Berkeley-style ad for the cold medicine Contac. The ad, called Cold Diggers of 1969, had a mass of women dancing into ornate patterns to Button Up Your Overcoat under a massive Art Deco style neon sign of the Contac logo. It’s very amusing (and probably looks even better if you dropped acid before watching it, as more than a few were prone to doing back then).
After that sudden flurry, interest in Berkeley would wane yet again. He died at his home in Palm Desert, CA, in 1976 at the age of 80. In his obituary, British newspaper The Guardian pointedly cited the fact that for many, Berkeley was “a vulgarian whose garish confections, usually involving women as fruits ripe for the plucking, were the epitome of American bad taste. Now, even in the age of women’s liberation, a nostalgic world takes a gentler view. The girly-merchandising Busby ballets are regarded more as celebratory masterpieces of art deco than as exploitative male fantasies. He even has an era named after him, which is more than you can say for Ingmar Bergman.”
Are Busby Berkeley movies worth rewatching? Oh my heavens, yes. He was a total original in American film.
Here are five films of his I recommend you add to your queue. You may end up shaking your head in bewilderment several times, but you won’t be disappointed.
Note: Almost all of these films were directed by someone else; Berkeley’s contribution is typically as the choreographer.
Ruby Keeler saves the show when the leading lady injures her ankle. And, let’s see, what other show biz tropes can we trot out? Will she be able to keep the wealthy investor in the show at arm’s length? Will the new director survive a health scare? And on and on. Berkeley did not direct this film but did provide the choreography, and this backstage musical saga really serves as a setup for his distinctive style.
The title song starts out as what appears to be a solo song and dance number on a Broadway stage, then gradually transforms into a much larger production that involves dozens and dozens of dancers who transform into buildings in New York City. 42nd Street is an excellent introduction to Berkeley’s style, and, perhaps more importantly, it is a lot of fun.
The woeful economic times of the Great Depression have hit Broadway, and four young women (the “gold diggers”) are struggling to make it through. All they need is a smash Broadway hit! Once again, Berkeley did not direct the film but served as the choreographer/production designer for the musical numbers. This film is actually based on a 1919 stage play, Gold Diggers, which was made into a silent movie in 1923, and then again as a talkie called Gold Diggers of Broadway in 1929.
The number to look for is We’re In the Movie, which features two dozen scantily-clad women wearing outfits made of coins. Oh, and one of the verses is inexplicably sung in pig Latin. There is also a surprisingly emotional and powerful number about World War I veterans, Remember My Forgotten Man. Berkeley apparently insisted on this dirge being included in the film as a tribute to his fellow veterans from that horrible war.
This is the fourth installment of Berkeley’s Gold Diggers series (the first two have been lost, unfortunately). There were two more after this one: Gold Diggers of 1937 (1937) and Gold Diggers in Paris (1938), both of which were rather declawed compared to their predecessors, mainly due to the implementation of the Hollywood Production Code that cracked down on the racy outfits and dialogue.
The plot in this one centers on Dick Powell, a struggling medical student working as a desk clerk at a swanky resort full of rich people. He’s engaged, but his fiancée urges him to take up Mrs. Prentiss’ offer to be the paid escort of her lonely daughter, played by Gloria Stuart! Yes, that Gloria Stuart from Titanic (1997). How will all these entanglements work out? And, frankly, isn’t Dick Powell the real gold digger here? And doesn’t this sound like the basic plotline to Dirty Dancing (1987)? But who cares? The plot really doesn’t hold up to careful scrutiny, so it’s best just to let Berkeley’s magic unfold.
The central number in this film is the unforgettable Lullaby of Broadway. This number takes up nearly 12 minutes from start to finish. It begins with a musical rendition of the life of a Broadway showgirl going to bed when everyone else is getting up to start their days and ends with an outrageously fabulous stage number featuring close to 100 tap dancers. The sets are like something out of a German Expressionist film from the 1920s. It’s all wonderfully weird.
But thankfully, there’s no point to it. No story being told. No drama unfolding in the dance. It’s just a huge number of dancers in various types of gowns and tuxedos tap dancing away in unison to the sprightly tune of Lullaby of Broadway. It has a shocking ending… or is it all just a dream? Regardless, I challenge even the most hard-hearted of you to watch this number and not smile while getting swept up in it.
An eccentric millionaire is traveling the country trying to improve its morals. He arrives at the center of all immorality in America—New York City, of course—and is disgusted by the musical productions on Broadway and… oh, forget it. Who cares what the plot is? The centerpiece of this movie is Berkeley’s outrageous “I Only Have Eyes for You” number that starts with a series of disembodied heads of Ruby Keeler floating around. Natch. Oh, my goodness, you have to see this movie to believe it.
As was typical of Berkeley’s movies, the “normal” parts were directed and completed before shooting the musical numbers. Berkeley had written a number for Joan Blondell about the fight between a cat and a mouse which ended with Blondell inviting everyone up “to see my pussy.” In 1934. Despite the independence Berkeley enjoyed at Warner Brothers, that line did not sneak by producer Hal Wallis and was cut.
David Raether is a veteran TV writer and essayist. He worked for 12 years as a television sitcom writer/producer, including a 111-episode run on the ground-breaking ABC comedy “Roseanne.” His essays have been published by Salon.com, The Times of London, and Longforms.org, and have been lauded by The Atlantic Magazine and the BBC World Service. His memoir, Homeless: A Picaresque Memoir from Our Times, is awaiting publication.