Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933)

Gold Diggers of 1933 — directed by Mervyn LeRoy and spectacularized by Busby Berkeley — has been more thoroughly watched, interpreted, contextualized, explained, poked, prodded, and dissected over the years than any other comedy of the era. It has been glossed in terms the male gaze, the commodification of women, the reduction of female bodies to machine parts, Fascist aesthetics, Depression-era hedonistic distraction, the post-World War I ethos of female gold-digging, choral dance design, feminist camp, and just plain camp. It’s one of those films that you’d think couldn’t be excavated any further; but then you can’t help but feel that whenever a new theory of cinema or history appears on the scene, it’s going to be applied to it eventually. Much of the commentary on the film is exciting and penetrating, but I think the orgy of interpretation may be coming to an end and that’s fine by me. And as the dust settles I hope folks will see the film as a whole and not just as spectacles + downtime. I care mainly about the comedy, and for my money, it’s one of the best comedies interwar Hollywood produced. Not in spite of the story, but because of it.

Like all the early Busby Berkeley collaborations, it’s a comedy about the closing of the theaters. Stuffy philistines want to block the dangerous vitality of the theater and popular art in general. It’s dangerous because it threatens the hypocrisy of their Protestant ethic that pretends to be about morality but is really about hoarding money. It was an existential theme for Depression-era studios and Broadway stages both, whose survival increasingly depended on the bankers. In Gold Diggers of 1933 (henceforth GD ’33) the situation is presented straight-up: the eros of artists comes under attack by moneyed patricians and their lawyers, who are willing to buy off the showgirls if they agree not to infect the respectable world of morality and business by digging for the gold that belongs rightfully to the bankster class. More than any of the other films except maybe Dames, GD ’33 targets that fundamental absurdity, the conflation of moral superiority and greed, the Coolidge-Hoover Republican posture that had manifestly enabled the Depression itself.

The basic plot is as old as the hills — or as old as Roman comedy, at least. The core story: 1) sons of the nobility fall in with fun-giving courtesans; 2) their heavy fathers work to reclaim the sons, with predictably haywire results — sometimes falling for the courtesans themselves; 3) a pimp and/or a tricky slave aids the sons and gals by tricking the fatherly forces; 4) lawyers, doctors, and/or other self-important professionals support the fathers, but they’re hypocrites with no moral power to do so. Add parallel plots at will. 19th century French farceurs adored this intrigue. It was a surefire way to expose the hypocrisy of the new moneyed classes, the petite bourgeoisie pathologically afraid of scandal and loss of status, while also providing sophisticated titillation by elevating the courtesans to the demi-monde. One of the less mentioned glories of GD ’33 is how this old story is both Americanized and proletarianized. The subversives are victorious democratic working women who not only dig for gold, but liberate it from buttoned-up, stifling parsimony into creative, erotic plenitude. And the film knows what it’s doing. Its ironies are so knowing and deliberate that a lot of earnest scholars aren’t even aware of them. It’s one of the rarest of kinds: a proletarian musical comedy.

Take the opening number, one of the most analyzed routines in the history of musical film.

The over-the-top display of chorines adorned with coins — coins as jewelry, clothing, armor, shields, hand-drums, hats — parading out of a dollar-sign door, singing Warren-Dubin’s “We’re in the money:” “Old Man Depression, you are through.” It’s a gloriously absurd dreamlike fantasy — and then the sheriff’s men arrive to break up the rehearsal, repossess the props right off the girls’ backsides, and end the dream-show. It turns out that it was a rehearsal only — for a no show. A lot of intelligent critics move on from this to detect in the coin-costumes and money-fashion runway parades the fetishization of women as commodities and objects of the male audiences’ erotic desires. In other words, the eroticization of money comes at the expense of womens’ agency. Women are just like coins, shiny matter to be used to acquire power. I don’t think that’s what’s going on. I think it’s the reverse. I guess it all depends on what you think the movie thinks about money — and what you think about it. And what the comic spirit thinks about fetishes.

The spectacle just isn’t naive. It’s plenty sophisticated. It has been analyzed as camp — and it’s surely that but not just that. Dubin’s lyrics personify the Depression as an “old man” who “done us wrong.” (Draw your own conclusions about the characters in songs who do folks wrong and who are done wrong to.) And now in this righted utopia “let’s lend it, spend it, send it rolling along!” Dante placed usurers in his Inferno precisely for not doing those things. For some commentators, the routine is about excess — but I think it’s more about plenitude; and the fantasy displayed before the audience’s eyes is an example of dynamic creative plenitude “rolling along.” Not a puritans’ cornucopia of fruits and vegetables, but real material cash in the modern world. Nothing is free, but there’ll be enough money for everyone. As for the male gaze, not only were there many working women in the audiences, many thrown out of work by the Depression, but also women who American-dreamed of creative freedom in work and self-display so long blocked by American puritanical gender codes, a freedom that could only be had through money, money that had been “withdrawn” by the Big Men of capitalism and the Protestant rulebook. It’s the American pipe dream unfolding before our eyes until the Pinkertons arrive. Faye’s (Ginger Rogers) surrealistic pig latin verse is like a message in a dream: we’re children playing games again, but our affirmations are backwards. We’re actually going backwards. And that’s what happens.

The rest of the film is the comic business of theater — that is, art, desire, fun, freedom, and play — restored almost entirely through the agency of working girls. It’s Brad’s $15,000 that allows the show to go on; he’s lending, spending, and rolling it along because he wants Polly to be its star. But after that point, every obstacle is cleared by Carol (Joan Blondell) or Trixie (Alice McGovern) by carrying their art of play into the fray with the blocking characters. Not even the show’s producer-director Barney (Ned Sparks) has such power. In striking contrast with the desperate perfectionist of 42nd Street, Julian Marsh, Barney simply creates space for the girls to make it happen.

Seen from this angle, GD ’33‘s central macher, Puck, and vehicle for the comic spirit, one who is never either a schlemiel or schlimazel, is Trixie (played by the brilliant and underappreciated Alice McMahon). As her all-American archetypal name tells us, she is the trickster who makes things shift, transform, and flow, and who makes both plots — stage and romance — go “rolling along.” She’s pegged at the outset as the least ladylike and the least likely object of romance. She’s a milk-thief, and a pickpocket, and the soul of survival. She’s Hermes in drag.

She’s “the comedy.” She is also the film’s meta — whatever the story is about at a given time, she’s its embodiment.

It’s Trixie who sweeps away the show’s first big obstacle, Brad’s (Dick Powell) insistent refusal to perform on stage. Now manifesting in nun’s drag, she makes the rich boy imagine the precarity of his co-workers — and his privilege.

She’s the one who who turns J. Lawrence’s (Warren William) arrogant misunderstanding that Carol is Polly (Ruby Keeler) into the full-blown comic scheme. She’s also the one with total command of the phallic fetishes — she’s a magician with Peabody’s (Guy Kibbee) cigarette case and cane.

And not just the boys’ fetishes. Comic power is no respecter of gender.

When Brad learns of Trixie’s plot, he approves it enthusiastically, as if watching a master at work. (Note how the two conflicting plots-within-the-plot — J. Lawrence’s and Trixie’s — converge toward happiness with neither principal intending it.)

Trixie’s the one who prevails on Carol make use of the good luck of J. Lawrence passing out on her couch. (Side note: it’s puzzling that so little commentary exists on Warren William, who was a versatile and very popular actor of the time. His role and performance as J. Lawrence are especially funny considering that in the 1933-35 years he played Dave the Dude in Capra’s wonderful Lady for A Day, excellent dramatic leads in The Match King, Employees’ Entrance, The Mind Reader, Back Door to Heaven, and became the lead in both the Perry Mason and Philo Vance series. His comic chops were rarely seen, but I love them in GD ’33.)

Trixie’s comic dominatrix reappears in the dreamlike “Petting in the Park” routine. Dressed in drag as a cop (there were no female beat cops in the real US in 1933), she’s a double-coded trickster with overt social power.

At first, she appears to obstruct dream-Polly from escaping from masher-Brad, an unlikely enforcer of male erotic prerogative.

But that’s not it. Her candy-cane baton is for directing Polly’s traffic to the means of her own escape-agency.

Which turns out to be a materialized dream-image of “rolling along” — the Rolling Skating Service for Little Girls Who Have to Walk Home.

And that’s not all. Defying the distinction of diegetic and nondiegetic characteristic of the whole film, Trixie reappears backstage after the routine, arm in arm with Peabody, still in her cop drag, but in a skirt, too.

Trixie and Peabody are now married, as are Brad and Polly (with the third wedding, Carol’s and J. Lawrence’s, on the horizon). Trixie’s wisecrack — “I ought to know, I’m the bride” — isn’t a cheap lesbian/mannish woman joke. She has demonstrated throughout the film that she can’t be fixed down to one role. She’s letting us know that in her half drag/half skirt, her half-gold digger/half-matchmaker role, for the moment she’s “the bride.” It’s good to know that. She has transformed the Bottom-like Peabody (remember, her nickname for him is “Fanny”) into a life-loving, free being — which makes her … wait for it … a Titania with no need for an Oberon. But the thing I like the most about Trixie’s appearance in this scene is her boutonniere — the white rose on the lapel of her forbidding uniform.

The last time we saw that rose was in the final shot of “The Shadow Waltz,” as dream-Polly tosses it into the pool, like an oneiric bridal corsage tossed from one reality to another.

But let’s recall that Trixie was wearing that rose in her lapel in the earlier dream-routine — if it belongs to anyone, it’s hers.

While I feel that each of the great early Warner Brothers Busby Berkeley collaborations has distinct virtues, GD ’33 has a special magic. The relationships between the dream spectacles and the backstage story, and between cinematic modernity and archetypal comedy, are closer than in the others. There’s still a lot of historical work to be done on how those films were conceived and made, given that the writers, directors, and musicians (on a spectrum from Warren and Dubin as songwriters to Ray Heindorf as arranger of the underscore) worked independently of each other as well as in concert. The fact that LeRoy and Berkeley worked on separate sound-stages makes it especially important to know what went on in conferences and brainstorming sessions. We know a lot about how the Astaire-Rogers films were made. We should know as much about the Busby B.s.

Bonus material:

The second half of “Pettin’ in the Park”: