E-Mail This Article to a Friend Mass productions Busby Berkeleyan idealism is on display at the HFA BY PETER KEOUGH
	"All Together Now: The ‘Cinematerpsichorean’ World of Busby Berkeley" At the Harvard Film Archive May 20 through 31.

As the weird and wonderful assortment of films in the Harvard Film Archive’s retrospective of his films demonstrates, anything is likely to turn up in a Busby Berkeley dance number. In Footlight Parade (1933; May 20 at 9 p.m. and May 22 at 7 p.m.), exhausted Berkeley stand-in Chester Kent (James Cagney) lists the gimmicks he’s resorted to for novelty effect. He’s tried tables, fountains, radios, flowers, more tables. One thing he doesn’t try much in his dance numbers is actual dancing. True, Ruby Keeler will pound her way through a scene or two like a roped, noncomprehending steer, joined perhaps by Dick Powell, who complains of his two left feet. But the only dancer that matters with Berkeley is the camera itself.

Unlike the tame apparatus that follows the elegant lines of Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, locking in for a full body shot to follow the couple across the stage, Berkeley’s camera breaks the completed motion down into individual frames, repeated images of what seems the same desirable girl shaped into kaleidoscopic, surreal arrangements on his monstrous, magical sets. When the camera tracks down the identical, smiling faces of a chorus line or (more to the point) through the archway of their spread legs, it’s like following an Eadweard Muybridge strip of human motion, a voyeuristic, fetishized frieze of the endlessly duplicated female form. As Dick Powell sings in the title song of Dames (1934; May 24 at 7 p.m.):

"Who cares if it’s got a plot or not, if it’s got a lot of dames?

What do you go for? Go see the show for?

Tell the truth — you go to see those beautiful dames."

True enough, but to get to those dames, some plot is in order, and invariably the story line reflects the process by which these staged dame dreams get produced. In Footlight Parade, Cagney’s Kent is a musical director whose livelihood has been cut short by the mass appeal of the talkies. He decides to produce "prologues," musical numbers preceding the feature film, an arrangement not unlike Berkeley’s own function in these early films: he’d direct the musical numbers (which usually came at the end, not the beginning) while another director (here, the crusty Lloyd Bacon) helmed the rest. In order to keep up with the demand of scores of theaters, Kent must mass-produce his "units," and that has him tearing his hair out coming up with new ideas.

Kent gets his cues for these fantasies from "real" life. Observing a bunch of kids cavorting at an open fire hydrant, he conceives a scenario of "water spraying on beautiful white bodies." (The kids at the hydrant are black.) This is how it unfolds on the "stage" in the "By a Waterfall" prologue. Perennial juvenile Dick Powell sits in a park by the side of his beloved Keeler, singing of how he adores the "simple" and "natural" setting. He dozes off, and the naughty Keeler sneaks away and uncovers a world of waterfalls and naiads and becomes a water sprite herself. With them she swims and dives and reproduces, forming ranks and files of regimented, waterlogged beauties set in motion by Berkeley’s randy camera, the most animated swimmer in the bunch. In a climactic moment, two opposed lines of back-floating babes interlink their legs into a human zipper, opening and closing as a single swimmer passes between them, a nightmarish embodiment of lust fulfilled and denied.

Of course, this could never happen on any stage. That’s why people go to the movies as opposed to just a "show," to enter this privileged, oneiric realm where the rules of reality don’t apply and everything dances to the whim of the polymorphously perverse camera. Nonetheless, this dreamland must emerge from the unglamorous workings of a production system, and that’s why the backstage portions of these early musicals offer some of the saltiest, funniest, and most cynical depictions of show business in cinema.

Footlight Parade was one of several films Berkeley collaborated on in 1933 for the hard-knock Warner Bros. studio, and it wasn’t the best, though it still beats any musical made in the past 10 years. Along with 42nd Street (1933; May 20 at 7 p.m. and May 22 at 9 p.m.) and Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933; May 21 at 7 p.m. and May 23 at 9 p.m.), it initiates and defines the backstage musical, and it’s been imitated ever since. These films are archetypes: to the best of my knowledge, 42nd Street (also directed by Bacon) is the first film in which the leading lady in a show (Bebe Daniels) breaks a leg and the ingénue (the inescapable Keeler) who replaces her becomes a star.

Poor Warren Baxter as the film’s tormented, sickly director. He sees his star go down, and when "Anytime Annie" Ginger Rogers is offered as a replacement, she claims she can’t hold a candle to the nondescript Keeler. Baxter needn’t have worried, however, for by the time Berkeley’s unit unrolls its numbers at the end, it’s clear that nobody will be paying attention to Keeler or any other individual performer. In "Shuffle Off to Buffalo," the elaborate and ingenious set and the rollicking camerawork and editing carry the tune, whose lyrics wryly subvert the moral stature of marriage and the family. After Powell croons to ever-expanding arabesques of shapely limbs, faces, and derrieres in "Young and Healthy," he tells Keeler how she’s killing the crowd. She’s not even in the number.

The best was yet to come, however; I’d rank Gold Diggers of 1933, in which Berkeley collaborated with Mervyn Leroy, as one of the 10 greatest Hollywood movies of all time. No need to wait till the end for the showstopper. Straight from the opening titles, the camera draws back from a glimmering close-up of Ginger Rogers’s dazzling smile to reveal her skimpily adorned in glinting strands of lucre. She’s singing "We’re in the Money," and the lyric becomes literal as the camera cranes and the world unfolds into chains of dancers doing the wave with giant coins. Until reality intrudes. Bailiffs descend to foreclose the show and a sheriff snatches the platter-sized silver dollar covering Rogers’s crotch.