I adore the early Warner studio Busby Berkeley movies, all of them. It’s hard to pick a favorite, but for now I’ll go with Dames. The films now all go under Berkeley’s name, but until Gold Diggers of 1935, Berkeley (hence BB) directed only the production numbers. Spectacular as they were, the four great films that came before Golddiggers of 1935 — 42nd Street, Gold Diggers of 1933, Footlight Parade, and Dames — were all directed by others (Lloyd Bacon, Mervyn LeRoy and Ray Enright). I guess it’s okay for folks to think of BB as the dominant artist of those films, since what he did was historically ground-breaking, but it also distracts from the movies as wholes. They were great not only because of BB, but because of the producers (Darryl Zanuck and Jack Warner mainly), the set- and costume designers, the songwriters (mainly Al Dubin and Harry Warren), the music arranger Ray Heindorf, and the studio’s great musical director, Leo Forbstein. And of course the stable of actors who appeared in most of them. The BB movies can be watched from the perspective of any of these artists — so in the end you have the sense of amazing collaborative constructions.
So much has been written about BB’s chorus-dance showstoppers, and almost nothing about the scripts. I love them. They are far more innovative than they appear. A lot of film historians have written about how Astaire-Rogers innovated by making their dance sequences integral parts of the narrative. In BB films cinematic innovations are happening on a larger scale — as the boundaries between the diegetic stories, the “intra-diegetic” stage performances, the songs sung by Dick Powell, the soundtrack, and the cinematography all melt away. Astaire wanted his dances filmed head on, so that the full bodies of the dancers were visible, as if to insist that dance is dance and cinema is something else. But in the BB films the opposite keeps happening. Everything becomes cinema. And this was not all BB’s doing. Much depended on the in-charge directors to control the whole cathedral building. So it’s fascinating to study how the different directors leaned in to BB’s production numbers. Right from the start in 42nd Street, it’s clear that everyone knew that the boundaries had to be thin ones.
I think Dames delivers the most complete effect of dreamlike seamlessness, and Ray Enright has aligned the non-spectacle parts with the spectacles in the most interesting way. By this point, most of the company had already worked together on three very successful films. Audiences knew what to expect of them. They didn’t want any story innovations or realism. They wanted to see the diegetic Broadway productions as both utopian bliss dreams and as the gritty labor of hardscrabble artists. And the core story had to be the same, too: the struggle of popular theater (representing both stage and cinema) against its most powerful malevolent opponent: the suffocating culture of the pretentious patrician elites. The stories are dependably Elizabethan: the powerful money lords want to close the theaters, censor freewheeling thought, and keep women confined. The heroes work hard to free the spirit through music and comic joy, sex and social pleasure. And it always works.
Dames is about all that. The “Ounce Foundation,” a puritanical organization of Brahmin culture, wants to prevent “The Show” from happening. Fortunately, they are bumblers and develop a taste for “elixir,” the inevitable loosener of uptightitude.
When the BB films were beginning to be rediscovered and studied, feminist criticism was also rising to the forefront in film scholarship, especially Laura Mulvey’s essay on the male gaze. Mulvey later modified her view, which could be — and was — read as having a lot in common with the Theater Closers’. BB’s films were sometimes held up as prime examples of male sexist vision, given the opulent display of female flesh in the production numbers. BB’s films were also sometimes critiqued for a sort of proto-fascist aestheticism, supposedly evident in the geometrical arrangements and transformation of human bodies into quasi-machine parts. I get all that. And I imagine that Weimar artists were probably entranced by them, on a knife edge between criticism and admiration.
A poster child for all that would be Dick Powell’s antic performance of the great Warren-Dubin title song, “Dames.” But I think all that — the severe Mulveyan critique, the political suspicion — is wrong-headed and anachronistic. (I have a few things to say about BB’s alleged fascist aesthetic.) All of the early BB films are richly ironic, and not in a sarcastic way. They are incredibly playful, and on an immense scale. And the audiences weren’t just a bunch of rubes. The BB films’ stories are maybe a bit morally loose (“gold diggers” were often treated as positive female tricksters in the literature of the Twenties and the Depression Thirties, acknowledging that women had very few avenues to wealth, no matter how hard they worked). But the stories are also sympathetic to working class women, and they place stage performers among working people, not bohemians.
One of my favorite parts of Dames is “The Girl with the Ironing Board.” It seems like an homage to old-style vaudeville, but in the context of the Depression, it’s a lot more than that.