I went to meet Charles and show him the tape of Busby Berkeley’s film Gold Diggers of 1935. It seemed an opportune time to run him this one, not only because the night before he was playing the Harry Warren compilation audiotape on which I’d dubbed the soundtrack recording of “Lullaby of Broadway” (I wanted to give him an opportunity to see the great number he’d so far only had the chance to hear) but also because the female lead is played by Gloria Stuart, who 62 years later got to film the comeback role of her life in the current #1 movie Titanic (she plays the modern incarnation of the character played by Kate Winslet in the bulk of the film — Winslet plays her in 1912 and Stuart in 1997 — and I remember being pleasantly surprised that she was in the film when last spring, in response to a long article in the L. A. Times detailing all the film’s production problems, she wrote a letter to the editor saying that James Cameron was one of the three best directors she’d ever worked with, along with James Whale and John Ford!). Though one misses the presence of a dancing star in this film — Ruby Keeler may not have been a great dancer at the level of Ginger Rogers (post-Astaire) or Eleanor Powell, but at least she was good and provided a focal point for Berkeley’s big numbers in the films they made together — Stuart, even in a fundamentally silly script (she’s the overprotected daughter of miserly rich bitch Alice Brady, who falls in love with hotel desk clerk and aspiring doctor Dick Powell), actually showed signs of major acting talent.
This time around, not having seen this film in a while, I
actually found myself rather charmed by the script — though its continuing
entertainment value actually comes in the numbers: the long, wordless opening
sequence (in which a crew of janitors, clerks, washerwomen, maids, polishers
and whatnot get a summer resort hotel ready for the season in unison and in
strict tempo while an instrumental version of the song “I’m Going Shopping with
You” plays on the soundtrack); and the big productions at the end, “The Words
Are In My Heart” and “The Lullaby of Broadway.” “The Words Are In My Heart” is
the one in which Berkeley gets 56 baby-grand pianos to dance, and is notable
for its stunning size displacements as well as the mobile pianos: Dick Powell
starts out in a garden setting, singing the song to Gloria Stuart, and the camera
pulls back to indicate that the garden setting, Powell and Stuart are just
parts of a floral arrangement on top of a giant spinet piano at which three women are sitting, one of them playing it
and all three doing a trio version of the song — Berkeley actually cribbed this gimmick from Sammy Lee’s staging of the song “It Was
Sweet of You” in Transatlantic Merry-Go-Round the year before (though Lee had relentlessly copied
the water ballet in “It Was Sweet of You” from Berkeley’s “By a Waterfall”
number in his previous film Footlight
Parade), but it’s still amusing to note
that the spinet the three ladies are sitting at is adorned with a candelabrum,
13 years before the film A Song to Remember (in which Chopin is going blind as he plays, and
servants bring in a candelabrum to help him see the keys) supposedly gave
Liberace the idea to make that his trademark. Then Berkeley pulls back and dissolves to his piano
ballet, and while for the most part the illusion that the pianos are
self-propelled is absolutely convincing, in the opening boom shot (while the
pianos are still mounted on a staircase, before he dissolves to a more typical
Berkeley overhead shot of them doing their stuff on a black Bakelite
background) one can readily see
the black-clad stagehands under the
pianos, pushing them around in order to make them move. (They were, of course,
hollow dummy props to keep the weight of them within reason.)
The “Lullaby of Broadway” number remains one of the most
audacious production numbers ever put on film — only the ballet at the end of
Gene Kelly’s An American in Paris can
compare with it for its fertility of imagination, and unlike the festive
Impressionism of the Kelly sequence, this is dark, sinister, almost noir, a far cry from the relatively unimaginative though
professionally competent direction of the rest of the film (Gold
Diggers of 1935 was the first film Berkeley
was allowed to direct entirely by himself — interestingly, he got two directorial credits, one as dance director and one
as director). The famous opening scene, in which a white pinprick on an
otherwise black screen swells until it fills the screen and is revealed to be
the disembodied head of Wini Shaw as she sings the opening chorus of the song,
then she throws her head back and
it disappears from the screen, to reveal the New York skyline while the rest of
the screen, all but the part where her head was, remains stark black, was copied for the 1951 film Lullaby
of Broadway but the rest of that number was
a typically unimaginative, stage-bound setting quite far from Berkeley’s
imagination. The number dramatizes Al Dubin’s lyric — “When a Broadway baby
says goodnight/It’s early in the morning/Manhattan babies don’t sleep
tight/Until the dawn” — and casts Shaw as a “Broadway baby” who, after a night
of nightclub-hopping with her rich beau (Dick Powell), comes home in the morning just as everyone else is
getting up, sleeps all day in her cheap apartment, wakes up again at 7 and gets
ready for another night on the town. This turns out to be another date with
Powell, who takes her to the “Club Casino” — where whole platoons of dancers of
both genders entertain them even though there seem to be no other audience
members in the club. “Come and dance!” cry the floor-show participants to Shaw, perched on
a balcony overlooking the floor. “My sweetie may not let me … Why don’t you
come and get me?” she sings back — and they do, pushing her farther and farther
back towards a set of French windows until they push her onto an outdoor
balcony, and then out of the club altogether and down to her death in the
street, many stories below (this nightclub must have been patterned on the
Rainbow Room, “sixty-five stories nearer the stars”), as the chorus sings the
chorus of “Lullaby of Broadway” as a requiem — and Shaw returns, magically restored, to sing the
final chorus of the song and become a pinprick on the screen again as the
number fades out. It’s a surprisingly sinister number for Berkeley (well, maybe
not so surprisingly — he did at
least two other big numbers, the title tune of 42nd Street and “Night Over Shanghai” from The Singing
Marine, which had sinister atmospheres and
ended with the deaths of their heroines), one of the closest approaches anyone
has come to musical noir. —
1/30/98
•••••
The film I picked out was the next in the Warner Bros. “Gold
Diggers” series, Gold Diggers of 1935, a
bit of a comedown after Gold Diggers of 1933 — by this time the Zeitgeist had shifted again and while the economy was still depressed, Franklin
Roosevelt had been president for over two years and the country’s mood was
considerably more optimistic. This was the first film in the series that
jettisoned Avery Hopwood’s rather shopworn (by then) Gold Diggers of
Broadway plot — though Robert Lord, who’d
written the 1929 Gold Diggers of Broadway movie, was one of the screenwriters here, along with Manuel Seff and
Peter Milne — and though Dick Powell played the male lead, Ruby Keeler sat this
one out and Gloria Stuart played the female lead. The movie was also noteworthy
for Busby Berkeley’s career in that he got to direct the entire film, not just
the production numbers (and he gets two credits, one for direction and one for dance direction, in the opening
roll) and for a marvelous opening in which he builds a production number out of
the preparations being made to open the swanky Wentworth Plaza resort hotel for
the summer season, in which floors are being polished, shoes shined, curtains
cleaned and waiters dressed for duty in a long silent sequence in strict time
to the rhythm of the intro music. Indeed, the sequence begins with a shot of a
magazine about horse breeding — which it turns out is being read by a homeless
man in a park! — and Berkeley’s camera dollies down the magazine’s page to an
ad for the Wentworth Plaza, and the picture of its entrance in the ad dissolves
to the real thing. While the whole idea of the resort as a plaything for the
rich is one the Soviet censors would have considered unconscionably decadent
and thereby horrendously politically incorrect, the number ironically mirrors
the practice of Soviet musical directors that, since the government regarded
depicting popular dancing as an example of bourgeois social decadence, they
would build their production numbers out of the musical depiction of work
itself.
Alas, the movie becomes considerably less creative once the plot gets
underway — an all too typical pattern for Berkeley but one his best movies, Gold
Diggers of 1933 and Footlight
Parade, avoided (Gold Diggers of
1933 through a compelling Depression-era
story and Mervyn LeRoy’s nervy direction, and Footlight Parade largely through the galvanic energy James Cagney
brought to the otherwise pretty standard plot) and we meet the key characters:
wealthy widow Mrs. Mathilda Prentiss (Alice Brady, carrying over from the Fred
Astaire-Ginger Rogers movie The Gay Divorcée in which she’d played a similar but more charming and
much less oppressive character)
and her daughter Ann (Gloria Stuart) and son Humboldt (Frank McHugh, getting a little more to do this time around and playing befuddled
rather than whiny). Mathilda is a New Englander who’s outrageously cheap (one
wonders if the writers were patterning her on the real-life New England widow
Hetty Green); Humboldt has married and divorced four showgirls, forcing mom to
cough up $100,000 each time; and Ann is about to be plunged into an arranged
(by Mathilda) marriage with T. Mosley Thorpe (Hugh Herbert at his most Hugh
Herbertiest), who’s got $15 million to the Prentisses’ $10 million but is an
asexual doofus whose only passion in life is collecting snuff boxes (he’s got
his collection in two exhibit cases which he won’t let the hotel porters
handle). Naturally Ann is revolted by him and the whole idea of having to marry
him, and in order to meet her demand that she be allowed one summer to do what she likes and have fun, mom hires
desk clerk Dick Curtis (Dick Powell, top-billed) for $500 to take her daughter
on dates. Dick’s initially reluctant to take the job because it makes him seem
too much like a gigolo, but his level-headed fiancée Arlene Davis (Dorothy
Dare) talks him into it because Dick’s studying to go to medical school and
$500 will pay his first year’s tuition, books and expenses. (My, how times have
changed.) There follows yet another Berkeley not-quite-production number to the
Harry Warren-Al Dubin song “I’m Going Shopping with You,” as Dick squires Ann
through all the shops inside the Wentworth Plaza and ends up buying her — on
her mom’s dime, of course! — modish dresses and hats, a beauty makeover (not
that Gloria Stuart really needs one!) and, as the capstone, a $12,000 diamond
bracelet, all while Dick Powell is crooning and Gloria Stuart is occasionally
supplying a line of almost-singing.
The next plot issue is an attempt by
non-paying guest Nicolai Nicoleff (Adolphe Menjou — a Frenchman cast as a comic
Russian, once again proving that in this era, as far as Hollywood was
concerned, one foreign accent was as good as another), a former theatrical producer/director,
to earn enough money to pay his hotel bill by conning Mrs. Prentiss out of a
large sum of money to stage her annual benefit for the Milk Fund at the hotel.
Joining the con are his set designer, Schultz (Joseph Cawthorn) — a
Jewish-dialect role (some of the most delicious moments of the movie are the
gags about Nicoleff and Schultz being unable to understand each other’s
English) — and Betty Hawes (Glenda Farrell), who got into Mosley Thorpe’s life
when he requested a stenographer to help him write his definitive monograph on
snuff boxes but who decided it would be more lucrative to trick him into
signing a love letter to her (he thinks it’s just the lyric of a song) and then
sue him for breach of promise. Indeed, one of the most annoying things of Gold
Diggers of 1935 is the sheer amount of
greed on which its plot is built: the hotel workers aren’t getting paid
salaries on the ground that they’ll earn their keep in tips, but the head of
each department is getting a kickback and the manager of the whole hotel, Louis
Lamson (Grant Mitchell), is getting a share of everybody else’s share. Nicoleff
and Schultz hatch a Producers-like
plot to get Mrs. Prentiss and Mosley Thorpe each to put up two-thirds of the
cost of doing the milk fund show — and Betty threatens to report them unless
they give her one-third of the extra third. One gets the impression that Dick
Powell’s and Gloria Stuart’s characters are meant for each other if only
because they’re the only people in the movie who aren’t either greedy or
creepy! Eventually, of course, Dick and Ann do end up together, Dick’s former fiancée Arlene ends
up with Humboldt Prentiss, Mosley is disgraced and becomes tabloid fodder, and
Mrs. Prentiss is ultimately reconciled to her daughter marrying Dick because
“think of all the money I’ll save on medical bills” with a doctor in the
family.
Of course, the main attraction of a Busby Berkeley movie is
the big production numbers, though after Gold Diggers of 1933 did a good job of spacing them throughout the film,
this one gives us two sort-of production numbers in the early going but then
holds off on the full-dress ones until the end. One is “The Words Are In My
Heart,” which begins with Dick Powell and Gloria Stuart in a waterfront park on
a moonlit night (tying in to an earlier performance of the song, a “straight”
rendition in which Dick is singing it to her in a speedboat which he’s parked
on the shore of the lake where the Wentworth Plaza is located), then dollies
back to three women sitting in front of an ornate antique piano — the scene
with Dick and Ann is supposedly a corsage atop the piano, and also atop it is a
candelabrum with three lit candles (13 years before the film A Song to Remember, which inspired Liberace to make the
candelabrum-on-top-of-the-piano his trademark!) — and then to the famous
sequence in which Berkeley had over 40 pianos animated and put them through a
production number. Each piano had a chorus girl supposedly playing it (the
“pianos” were actually dummy shells so they could be pushed around the
soundstage in the pattern Berkeley wanted, and the black velvet-clad stagehands
under them pushing them around
can clearly be seen in some shots) and they form into a typical undulating
Berkeley chorus line, then into the shape of a huge piano, and finally a
rectangular dance floor on which a single girl does a solo dance. (The number
is indicative of the way the Berkeley musicals and the Fred Astaire-Ginger
Rogers films were cross-influencing each other; the first Astaire-Rogers film, Flying
Down to Rio, had featured them dancing to
“The Carioca” on a dance floor made up of six rotating pianos, and it had also
featured long wordless sequences of a hotel being made ready for its tourist
season.) It’s a wonderful number but also an indication of how desperate
Berkeley was becoming for new, fresh ideas — for the film Stars Over
Broadway he wanted to do a chorus line of
dancing trees, but Jack Warner decided that would have been too expensive and
refused to green-light the sequence, which inspired Berkeley to give MGM a call
and see if they might want him
when his Warners’ contract expired — but the next number, “Lullaby of
Broadway,” is enough in itself to make the whole film worth watching.
It’s the
entire fantasy of “Broadway babies,” gold-diggers and the men who date (and
finance) them wrapped up into one number, beginning with a shot that would
become a Berkeley trademark: a white speck of light in an otherwise pitch-black
screen, gradually swelling in size until it’s revealed to be the head of featured
singer Winifred Shaw (called “Winny” in the cast list, identified as “Miss
Shaw” in the dialogue and later billed as “Wini” in other films) crooning the
song in a haunting contralto about midway between Helen Morgan’s and Ivie
Anderson’s. As Berkeley’s camera dollies towards her (remember that Berkeley
made it a professional fetish never
to use more than one camera to shoot his elaborate productions), Shaw’s face
gradually fills the screen, then turns as she lights a cigarette, then her face
disappears and becomes a cut-out through which we see an overhead vision of New
York City. Then follows a montage of ordinary New Yorkers (most of them young
and female, of course!) getting dressed and going to work at ordinary jobs,
only while the rest of the city is waking up Wini Shaw is being driven home in
a taxi by her beau (Dick Powell) and let off in front of her apartment, because
according to Al Dubin’s lyrics “Manhattan babies don’t sleep tight until the
dawn.” The day progresses for everyone else, and then shortly after 7 p.m.
Wini’s alarm clock goes off and she readies herself for a night on the town.
This time Dick takes her to the “Club Casino,” a surrealistic establishment
that’s all Deco, looks like it’s the size of two airplane hangars and has a floor
show featuring tango dancer Ramon (his usual partner Rosita sued Warners
because she was billed in the film but the girl he danced with in it was
someone else) and then enough chorus people of both genders to mount an
invasion of a small Caribbean country. (Critics wondered how it stayed in
business and met its gigantic payroll when Dick Powell and Wini Shaw appeared
to be its only paying customers.) What’s more, the choruses in this film are
actually doing some hard-core dancing instead of just being marched through one of Berkeley’s quasi-military
formations — and the thunder of their tap shoes hitting art director Anton
Grot’s Deco floors itself becomes surprisingly intimidating. The choristers
call on Wini to “come and dance!” “My sweetie may not let me … why don’t you
come and get me?” she cries out, and they do, driving her to the club’s
balcony, charging her and ultimately pushing her to her death when the doors
give way and she takes a tumble off the balcony to the ground many floors below
— only to revive magically when it’s time for Berkeley to take the number out
again and reverse the opening shot, a close-up of Shaw crooning the last line
of the song (“Listen to the lullaby of old Broadway”) as her face dwindles in
size to become a pinprick on the screen again.
“Lullaby of Broadway” was
Berkeley’s favorite of his numbers, and though (as Charles pointed out) it
doesn’t have the emotional impact of “Remember My Forgotten Man” it’s a
dazzling piece of imaginative filmmaking — and when, in a miscarriage of
justice that probably helped sink the Academy’s short-lived award for dance
direction, it lost in that category, the man who won, Dave Gould (for the
spectacular but hardly as audacious “straw hat” number Maurice Chevalier
performed in Folies Bergère),
gave Berkeley the award because even he thought Berkeley should have won. (Ironically, “Lullaby of Broadway”
itself won the Best Song Oscar for Harry Warren and Al Dubin, Berkeley’s
favorite songwriters.) It’s also amazing that it didn’t launch Wini Shaw on a
superstar career; it’s the sort of introductory showcase newcomers dream of
(though she’d actually made nine films before it, including Gift of
Gab, the elusive 1934 Universal musical
that starred Edmund Lowe, Gloria Stuart and Ruth Etting, and featured Boris
Karloff and Bela Lugosi in a guest scene as themselves) but Warners kept her
mostly in undistinguished “B”’s (including a villainess role in the first
Torchy Blane movie, Smart Blonde)
and she retired in 1939 even though she lived into the 1980’s. Gold
Diggers of 1935 is a bit of a comedown from
its predecessors but the “Lullaby of Broadway” number is a work of cinematic
genius and stands apart from the rest of the movie much the way “Let’s Face the
Music and Dance” soars above the rest of the Astaire-Rogers musical Follow
the Fleet — and though you might not guess
it from this film, Berkeley was actually a surprisingly accomplished
non-musical director (he’d made his debut as full director in a quite good
pre-Code melodrama called She Had to Say Yes, starring Loretta Young, in 1932, and shortly before
he left Warners for MGM in 1939 he did They Made Me a Criminal, an exciting and suspenseful thriller with John
Garfield) who could make great movies even without platoons of chorus girls and dances with (normally)
inanimate objects. — 8/27/12
