Hollywood Hotel is a relatively late Busby Berkeley movie. As far as I know, this was the first film that BB directed by himself. Scholars justly talk about 42nd Street, Golddiggers of 1933, and Dames as great films; Hollywood Hotel isn’t great like that, but it has its virtues. It’s a cute and rocking comedy without sentimentality. It marks a sharp change from the grand Berkeley spectacles that preceded it. Despite the fact that BB was in charge of the whole shebang for the first time, there’s no awesome showstopper, and the story is much more complicated than usual. The shift from Broadway as a setting to Hollywood is a move away from the old-school/old-world stories of philistines versus scrappy artists to a whole new thing: rich Hollywood phonies versus sincere midwestern aspirers. So the historical aura of Broadway stages and Follies extavaganzas is all gone. No Joan Blondell, no Ruby Keeler (thankfully). There’s a show within a show (it’s a movie, of course), with a stupid blackface (so far from the vaudeville stage, it is especially irritating). The faux showstopper is basically a gigantic Copacabana-meets- Hollywood-Bowl kitsch fest. But the Benny Goodman band has a prominent role, and there’s extensive Goodman footage, including the quartet with Lionel Hampton, Teddy Wilson, and Gene Krupa going a mile a minute. For all its major-league jazzband props, though, it’s mainly an exuberant farce about Hollywood stardom, complete with spitting-image impostors. And another deft Dick Powell performance.