|
In each of Berkeley’s films, the central conflict is an obstacle to putting on a show. In this case, it’s no less than the Depression itself. Saving the day is Dick Powell as out-of-work songwriter Brad, who’s also the scion of a blueblood Boston family. A marriage of high art and low, aristocrat and lowly hoofer, seems in the offing, but it’s Brad’s tune "Remember My Forgotten Man" (actually, Harry Warren & Al Dubin’s) that provides the film’s downbeat finale. Sung by Joan Blondell and Etta Moten, the requiem comforts Berkeley’s endless arches of ex-doughboys (a rare instance when the chorus line is male) as they march in the rain. The frivolous musical has turned political and profound; "Remember My Forgotten Man" fuses the tragedy of real life and the transcendence of cinema into one of Hollywood’s unforgettable triumphs. Be sure that such expressions of sex and politics, however tuneful and dreamlike, did not escape the moral watchdog’s eye. By 1934, the Production Code was in effect. In Dames, Berkeley confronted this latest obstacle to putting on a show. Millionaire mogul Ezra Ounce (Hugh Herbert, goofily reprising a similar role in Footlight Parade), unlike his modernist-poet near-namesake (another bluenose is named Hemingway), is determined to repress all sexuality in the arts, starting with chorus girls. Unlikely plot complications find him attending opening night of his nephew Dick Powell’s new show, Hot and Sweet. The acts he sees are textbook cases of Freudian dream dynamics. "The Girl at the Ironing Board" features Joan Blondell as a laundress singing the title tune, which celebrates the fetishistic delights of washing men’s underclothes; it ends with her being attacked by several lines of empty union suits in an apparent gang rape. "Dames" might be Berkeley’s consummate work of female body abstraction, collaging scores of Hollywood’s most nubile dancers into undulating snowflakes. But creepiest of all is "I Only Have Eyes for You." Once more in the arms of Keeler, this time on the subway, Powell again dozes off and plunges into a vision of Hell. Dozens of girls flow into kaleidoscopic designs, but each is in a Ruby Keeler mask. It’s Being Ruby Keeler. Then they throw up their skirts, which become the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle forming a giant image of Keeler’s impenetrable, idiot features. Finally, Powell tears through this paper image, singing the last notes of the song. Can there be a more surreal metaphor of the sublimation and extinction of desire? Berkeley would not reach these heights again as he shifted from gritty Warner Bros. to clean-cut, fancy-pants MGM. In Babes in Arms (1939; May 27 at 7 p.m.), the first film he directed for his new studio, the male protagonist, like his own creative potency, has shrunk to the stature of Mickey Rooney. The female lead, however, has grown from the cipher of Keeler to the developing icon of Judy Garland. There is one wacky, Berkeleyan moment at the beginning of the film. The "babes," children of over-the-hill vaudevilleans determined to put on their own show (featuring a minstrel act, no less), march into the streets singing the title anthem. Their behavior is wildly inappropriate. They carry torches like a lynch mob, building a towering bonfire around which their shadows dance as if it were Walpurgisnacht. Impressive but meaningless: in this film and in Babes on Broadway (1941; May 27 at 9 p.m.), you wait for the real Berkeley moment to happen, but it never does. Instead, in his decline, Berkeley offers a glimpse at the future of the musical. For Me and My Gal (1942; May 28 at 9 p.m.) stars a painfully thin and intense Garland as a vaudeville trouper who gravitates to caddish song-and-dance man Gene Kelly. Their dream of playing at the Palace and then getting married must face such obstacles as a highbrow French chanteuse and World War I. It’s a variation on A Star Is Born, and there’s not a chorus line to be seen, unless you include the ranks of the soon-to-be-forgotten men going off to the front. For better or worse, the star of the musical has become the dancer, not the dance.
page 1
page 2
|
