Search - Gold Diggers of 1935 on DVD

Number-crunching

Jay Dickson | Portland, OR | 12/16/2006

(4 out of 5 stars)

"After having directed the musical numbers for several of their films -- 42ND STREET, FOOTLIGHT PARADE, and GOLD DIGGERS OF 1933 ---, Warner Bros. finally let Busby Berkeley be the sole director for GOLD DIGGERS OF 1935, which as usual only features three musical numbers (with two of the big numbers stockpiled at the very end of the film). The plot concerns a stingy millionairess (Alice Brady) losing control of her two children at an expensive lake resort, and the characters are the two-dimensional types -- the easily-horrified dowager, the excitable Russian impresario, the stuffy collector of curios, etc. -- that might have been lifted from restoration comedy. Berkeley has such a heavy hand with his actors, however, that the acting seems more akin here to Kabuki. Brady even sustains a bizarrely florid hand gesture to indicate when she is thinking (you would never guess that in a year she would be honored with a Best Supporting Oscar for her sensitive work in IN OLD CHICAGO). The verbal repartee isn't very scintillating either. Much of it has to do with the characters figuring out various numerical sums (interest on annual income, percentages for financing a Broadway show) that become so overwhelming and repetitive they can have your head spinning before too long.

Fortunately Berkeley is infinitely more skilled as a director with motion and music than he is with spoken comedy. Indeed, his great skill is always negotiating complex movement through a myriad variations on a common theme, which may explain the film's obsession with numbers. The beginning number is not really a dance at all, but a tricky and breathtaking montage of the hotel's workers preparing for the summer guests done like a big musical number (all to the strains of the film's first big number, "I'm Going Shopping with You"). There is also one of his hypnotically trippy big show-with-a-show numbers featuring dozens of chorus girls (56 to be precise) playing with common physical objects, like the violin for "The Shadow Waltz" in GOLD DIGGERS OF 1933: here it is pianos, and we see all 56 of them (one for each girl) form kaledioscopic patterns in the number "The Words Are in My Heart." The highlight of the film is its final number, which is considered by many to be Berkeley's masterpiece, a surrealistic narrative set to the tune of "The Lullaby of Broadway," which was specially composed for the film. It's often been said that this number can stand on its own as a brilliant modernist short, and thought he narrative clearly seems to be an allegory, scholars have debated for years what it seeks to allegorize (decadence? fascism? modernism?). Before the narrative itself ensues, the entire song is sung all the way through by Wini Shaw, whose spotlighted face is shot from a great distance against a sea of blackness, gradually growing larger and larger before we dissolve to the narrative: this first section is accomplished through what must be one of the simplest but most stunning shots in the history of film."