Gold Diggers of 1933 (Warner Bros., 1933)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (March 6) at 9:15 p.m. Turner Classic Movies showed the film Gold Diggers of 1933 as part of their “31 Days of Oscar” salute. Last night they did a mini-tribute to the so-called “pre-Code” era of American filmmaking from 1930 to 1934, when the Production Code was already in effect but was far more loosely enforced than it was after 1934, when as part of a concerted campaign against so-called “dirty movies” in general and Mae West in particular, the U.S. branch of the Roman Catholic Church formed a pressure group called the “Legion of Decency” (which says it all) and browbeat the studios into strictly enforcing the Code. Gold Diggers of 1933 began life as a 1918 play by Avery Hopwood called The Gold Diggers, which premiered on Broadway in 1922 after a tryout three years earlier in Atlantic City and was a big enough success that Warner Bros. bought the movie rights and filmed it in 1923 as a silent starring Hope Hampton (who’s been advanced as one of the real-life prototypes, along with Marion Davies and would-be opera singer Ganna Walska, for the character of Susan Alexander in Citizen Kane; she was the mistress of Jules Brulatour of Eastman Kodak, and Brulatour put out the word that any studio which used her would get a discount on their film). This film was long thought lost until a nearly complete print from Belgium turned up in Britaiin in 2021 and has since been posted to YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yg54vN--mLA, but in a terrible condition. In 1929 Warners remade it as Gold Diggers of Broadway, a full-out musical in two-strip Technicolor, but that version is also pretty much lost: a complete set of the Vitaphone soundtrack discs for the film survives (and was released a decade ago on Brad Kay’s Superbatone label) but only about 15 minutes of the picture does.

After the surprise success of 42nd Street in 1932, Warner Bros. greenlighted a remake if Gold Diggers on Broadway and called it Gold Diggers of 1933 – though the publicity for the film made it seem like a sequel instead of a remake º and my husband Charles and I watched the surviving bits of Gold Diggers of Broadway (we listened to the soundtrack discs and plugged in the two surviving bits of the film where they went) and then watched Gold Diggers of 1933. The most striking difference between the two was the Zeitgeist issue; Gold Diggers of Broadway was produced before the 1929 stock market crash (though it was released just as the economy was starting its long-term collapse) while Gold Diggers of 1933 was not only made during the depths of the Depressoin but worked the economic crisis rather deftly into its plot. I re-watched it last night and marveled at the fact that it’s now been longer between the time I first saw it (1971,when I was 17) and now than it was between the time it was made and the time I first saw it. The opening sequence – in which Barney Hopkins (Ned Sparks) is rehearsing a show number called “We’re In the Money” which boasts, “Old man Depression, you are through, you done us wrong.” featuring Fay Fortune (Ginger Rogers), who sings a chorus of the song in pig-Latin (something the real Rogers did as a joke during rehearsals, and directors Mervyn LeRoy and Busby Berkeley liked it and stuck it in the film), only a gang of law-enforcement officer led by the sheriff steps in and attaches the scenery and costumes – still packs a punch.

The film is full of “:pre-Code” sauciness, including one line between chorus girls Polly Parker (Ruby Keeler), Carol King (Joan Blondell) and Trixie Laverne (Aline MacMahon) about the strange young man named “Brad Roberts” (Dick Plwell), who lives either down the hall or across in the next building. Polly has heard Brad play his piano and fallen in love both with his music and with him,and Barney has auditioned Brad and offered him the job of writing the score for his next production – only Barney doesn’t have a backer for it. Brad offers to put up $15,000 for it and the girls wonder just how someone who’s apparently living under the strained circumstances that they are can possibly have that much money to invest in a show. Thinking he’s just teasing them, Trixie says,m “I’d like to have some of whatever he’s taking” – a direct reference to drug use that was one of the Production Code’s big no-nos. The plot of Gold Diggers of 1933, as adapted by the writing committee – screenplay by Erwin Gelsey and James Seymour,dialogue by Robert Boehm and Ben Markson – cuts back and forth between Depression realities and musical fantasies.Busby Berkeley gets four big production numbers – “We’re In the Money,” heard at the very start of the film (and interrupted by the irony that the show as canceled before it opens precisely because they’re not in the money); “Pettin’ in the Park,” heard midway through (and with some marvelously cheeky satire; midway through the number we see a business advertising roller skates for rent “for women who have to walk home,” and at the end the chorines are dressed in metal tops and Dicl Powell can’t figure out how to make love to Ruby Keeler until a baby, played by little-person actur Billy Barty, shows up and hands him a can opener); and “Shadow Waltz” and “REmember My Forgotten Man” at the end.

“Shadow Waltz” is one of Berkeley’smost audaciously abstract numbers – one reason for Berkeley’s comeback in the early 1970’s is that he was able to make essentially psychedelic images, only instead of light shows or abstract shapes he used actual human bodies – but “Remember My Forgotten Man” is the best part of the film. As a lament for the Depression it rivals “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” and it’s delivered by Joan Blondell as essentially the 1933 versioin of rap. She talk-sings her way through the song – when she tries to let out her voice and sing at the end it’s oddly less effective – and I suspect Berkeley was thinking along the lines of Fanny Brice’s performance of “My Man” in the 1920 Ziegfeld Follies and how she re-invented herself as a tragedienne instead of a comedienne for this tough, mordant song. The astounding succession of images of people marching to war ahd then coming back to breadlines still packs a powerful punch and says all you need to know about the Depression and the blow it struck to the human spirit. The filmmakers seemed to know that this number was unfollowable because they made sure to wrap up the plot intrigues before the number takes place, so we cut from the big “Forgotten Man” number directly tot he end title.

TCM’s host tried to draw a distinction between the Wanrer Bros. musicals of the early 1930’s, which dealt frankly and openly with the Depression, and the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers musicals which came after them and were frankly escapist – but the distinction isn’t as neatly drawn as all that. At least one Astaire-Rogers musical\, Swing Time, features him riding a freight train in utter destitution in a scene Arlene Croce described in The Gred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Book as “top hats and empty pockets.” And there’s an interestingly ironic reference to Astaire: when Barney is encouraging Brad to play the lead in his musical based on Brad’s songs, he says he and Polly can become a star couple “like the Astaires.” He meant Fred Astaire and his sister Adele,whom he had never performed without until she retired in 1930 to marry into the British nobility – and he would achieve movie stardom in partnership with Ginger Rogers, who’s in this movie playing a dubiously talented woman who, after she loses the starring role in Barney’s previous show, tries to get a big role in Barney’s next production and also to win the comic-relief rich guy, Faneuil Peabody (Guy Kibbee) away from Aline MacMahon.