Busby Berkeley’s classic films of the 1930s were very popular and much imitated but they weren’t analyzed very much until recently. An online content search reveals that even reviewers’ discussions of the films tailed off gradually between the 1940s and the 1960s. The great classics were rarely seen until repertory movie houses, film festivals, and retrospectives became established in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Those institutions were confined to a few big cities. The first VHS tape of Gold Diggers of 1933, the first to be canonized as a classic, wasn’t until 1984, so until the ’80s the conversations about the films were restricted to metropolitan cinéastes and culture vultures.
Those conversations came to fervid life with the publication of Susan Sontag’s essay “Fascinating Fascism” in 1975. Sontag was one of the leading intellectual “influencers” of the time, a leading voice of the New York culturati. Although the essay was devoted to analyzing the Nazi aesthetics of Leni Riefenstahl, Sontag commented in passing that she detected certain qualities of fascist aesthetics in Disney’s Fantasia and Berkeley’s The Gang’s All Here. That was it. A cryptic side note in a parenthesis. No explanation. Soon, feminist and leftist film scholars were inspired to elaborate and a sort of critical-theoretical industry began of treating the Berkeley films as exemplars of a fascist aesthetics hidden in plain sight in old Hollywood, as well as textbook examples of the cinema of the male gaze and the exploitation of women.
My previous entries on the classic films deal mainly not with their spectacles but with their comic stories, for which Berkeley had minimal responsibility. That’s because I don’t feel ready to write about the spectacles; their connections to the narratives are too dreamlike for easy answers. But this “fascist aesthetic” thing irritates me. It comes up again and again, sometimes in the work of important film theorists like Robin Wood, more often from lesser critics eager to signal that they are on the right side of history. One of the most cited contributions to the cliche-chain came from a leading historian of Hollywood comedies and musicals, Gerald Mast. In his popular book Can’t Help Singin’: The American Musical on Stage and Screen published in 1987, Mast claimed that Berkeley’s Footlight Parade was one of Hitler’s favorite movies. He didn’t provide attribution for it, and I haven’t been able to find any evidence to back it up. In fact, there’s no evidence Hitler ever saw a Busby Berkeley film. (Bill Niven doesn’t even mention Berkeley in his book Hitler and Film: The Führer’s Hidden Passion, published in 2019.) Mast’s lazy statement has led dozens of folks in the blogosphere to repeat it as a way of saying “nuff said” regarding the supposed latent fascism of the films. Some even think they’ve found visible evidence in the big dance sequence of “Lullaby of Broadway,” from Gold Diggers of 1935. As the male dancers enter and climb the massive steps, they appear to raise their arms in unison in what some believe resembles a Nazi salute. (I’ll get to this silly misprision a bit later.)
Sontag’s linking of Berkeley with Riefenstahl was completely valid. Riefenstahl is on the record with her admiration for the Berkeley spectacles. And no one can dispute that the Nazi high command adored Hollywood films; for Goebbels, Hollywood was the model propaganda machine. (Goebbels had a problem, of course. Hollywood was governed by Jewish studio heads and producers, from whom the techniques of mind-control had to be wrested.) For what it’s worth, there’s no evidence even that Goebbels saw a Busby Berkeley film. Nonetheless, it’s plenty clear that German film directors under Goebbels’s eye did see them, admired them, and imitated them. So the guilt-by-remote-association argument goes like this: because Nazis admired Berkeley, his films must have had fascist tendencies. That’s a textbook logical fallacy.
When elaborated by more thoughtful critics, the argument becomes this: Berkeley’s spectacles display large groups of chorines/dancers performing in unison, constructing complex abstract patterns out of performers who are “dehumanized,” made to behave as parts in a machine. Because most of these dehumanized parts are women whose erotic allure is accentuated, the spectacles double the domination. They underscore the power to control human bodies by generalizing the human as female — pliant, exploitable, easy to discipline and to bend to the will of powerful male designers.
Whether Berkeley exploited his chorines, and whether his films propped up a male-supremacist regime, are valid questions. I think the answers are pretty obvious but simplistic moralizing doesn’t do them justice. As for the association of the films with fascism, that really needs to be put to rest. In almost every case, what the critics see as fascist sensibilities are attitudes that not only predate fascism but were shared by all modernist cultures — in Europe, in the Soviet Union, and in the USA: the aesthetics of the machine — the idealization of mechanical production combined with the eroticization of precision.
Film historians have become immeasurably more sophisticated and on guard against anachronistic, tendentious analyses of Hollywood films than in the 70s and 80s. Many historians of early Hollywood musicals have embraced the ideas of Siegfried Kracauer, an important theorist of film and architecture in Weimar Germany. Kracauer devoted a lot of space in his magnum opus, The Mass Ornament, published in 1927, to analyzing The Tiller Girls, a company of precision dancing “girls” who were international sensations from the 1910s through to the 1930s. (Billy Wilder wrote a fluff piece about their visit to Berlin back in his fluff-journalist days.) Kracauer argued that The Tiller Girls — the inspirations for the Rockettes and countless chorus-line choreographies — were exemplars of the modern infatuation with mechanism as a social principle. Their movements and routines reflected the modern world’s immersion in the ideology of society working with the unity, precision, and discipline of the assembly-line factory. Their transformation of human bodies into mechanical parts was, for Kracauer, a completely appropriate representation of early 20th century “advanced” cultures’ acceptance of Henry Ford’s assembly-line revolution in production: of wealth, of plenitude, of mass social discipline.
Years after the publication of The Mass Ornament, Kracauer remembered his insights about The Tiller Girls. In an 1931 essay entitled “Girls and Crisis,” Kracauer wrote:
I clearly recollect the appearance of such troupes in the season of their fame. When they built a line that moved up and down, they radiantly illustrated the advantages of the conveyor belt; when they tap-danced at a fast tempo it sounded like “business, business, business”; when they threw their legs high with mathematical precision, they happily affirmed the progress of streamlining; and when they did the same thing again and again without breaking ranks one imagined an uninterrupted chain of cars gliding out of the factories into the world.
Berkeley learned his craft working on the spectacular productions of the Ziegfeld Follies. In his wonderful study, Swinging the Machine: Modernity, Technology, and African American Culture between the World Wars, Joel Dinerstein details Florenz Ziegfeld’s practice of combining complex choreographies of alluring young female dancers with celebrations of US technological development, in essence eroticizing the Machine Age. Berkeley elevated this combination through his cinematic innovations, creating an even more logical synthesis of erotic gazing and the quintessential desire-production machine, cinema itself. This fusion of flesh and mechanism, dancing bodies and top-down design, spoke to all modernizing cultures eager to make the new technological regime feel pleasurable, exciting, and transformative.
We see a version of it in, for instance, the legendary Soviet film musical, The Circus, made in 1936 in the darkest time of Stalin’s rule. The Berkeleyan Broadway show has been replaced by the circus, the most established and developed form of spectacular entertainment in Russia even today.
[It’s ironic that Mosfilm has blocked my clip of The Circus on copyright grounds. Russians are among the most industrious and brazen copyright violators in the world.]
In Nazi Germany, too, giddy musicals displaying chorines moving precisely as parts of fantasy machines were popular — not as celebrations of disciplined masses but as the apotheosis of cabaret kitsch. The most famous example is Es leuchten die Sterne (The Stars Shine), made in 1938. Kitsch, yes. Fascist aesthetics, nope.
Before getting too far ahead, it’s important to identify specific examples of what critics considered fascistoid in Berkeley’s films. Sontag mentions only The Gang’s All Here, a puzzling choice that makes me wonder how many of Berkeley’s films Sontag actually saw. Other critics mention the “By a Waterfall” spectacle in Dames; some have even claimed it was one of Hitler’s favorite movie displays — again, with absolutely no evidence. Most critics seem to land on the big dance scene in the “Lullaby of Broadway” finale of Gold Diggers of 1935. I’ve isolated that mass dance from the rest of the episode. It’s worth looking at it again.
The “Lullaby of Broadway” is one of the great productions of classic Hollywood — so original it has been called surrealistic and gothic, and so enigmatic that film historians shy away from interpreting it. Its dance sequence is one of the most complex ever staged in Hollywood musicals. This is the main scene in Berkeley’s body of work that critics site as fascistoid, noting the enormous ensemble of precision dancers, the stark uniform-like costumes, the monumental set, and the frequent long shots taken as if from a promontory that dwarfs the 100 human figures.
I think one of the irritants for those critics may be the sense that the dance is more drill-like than they are comfortable with. Instead of the fictively spontaneous personal joy of Astaire and Rogers, the “Lullaby”‘s dancers may seem to them military, and the hosannas to the observing couple (Wini Shaw and Dick Powell) must create the impression of authoritarian adulation. If so, I think it’s all nonsense. While in the Army during World War I, Berkeley designed marching drills, a practice that surely influenced the way he imagined ways of creating complex kinetic designs out of human performers. (His aerial reconnaissance assignments were similarly likely inspirations for his revolutionary overhead camera.) It’s plausible that at least some of Berkeley’s critics in the post World War II era conflated — perhaps unconsciously — all military displays with fascist militarism. Especially during the Vietnam War years, even marching band performances were seen by left-leaning culture critics as evidence of the establishment’s militarism. The counterculture’s ethos emphasized individual expression to the degree that not only precise line dancing but even ballroom pair partnering declined. In the early 1930s, by contrast, marching drills had become artful. The aesthetic appeal of large groups moving to create complex patterns comported well with the felt need to display American unity and technical expertise. There is more than a hint of the jazzy marching drill teams in the mass dance of the “Lullaby.” (For reference, check out a recent vid of the legendary Texas A&M marching band.)
So let’s look closer at the “Nazi salute” moment that disturbs some viewers. Taken in isolation, the shot looks pretty bad.
But it would be ludicrous to do so. As a still shot, it is simply an optical illusion. The gesture is part of an extremely complex choreography that includes not only dance steps but hand gestures. The “salute” is clearly left-hands raised to the side. Let’s be clear, a real Nazi salute is performed by raising the right hand directly to the front of the body. That’s actually beside the point, since the dancers’ gesture is immediately followed by an identical gesture to the right as the dancers turn their bodies. What’s more, the dancers are pumping their arms. It’s not a salute at all. If anything, it resembles the “hi-de-ho” gestures of contemporary Black line dancing.
This passage then evolves into the full combined chorus’s gestural dance — everyone repeats the pumping arms to each side, now both arms together.
These are pieces building to the gestural finale, the full chorus raising their hands upwards, evoking the “Hallelujah” gestures of minstrel (and actual) Black revival performances.
Choreographed group hand gestures have long been part of the African-American drill tradition. Here’s a contemporary example by the drill team of a Black church. (Drill teams have become very popular among Black churches.)
There are probably dozens more ways to refute the association of Berkeley with the fascist aesthetic. But the Net being what it is, ludicrous myths never die, they just find new servers.
Go Aggies!