1933 Directed by Mervyn LeRoy, Busby Berkeley
Things get tough for Carol and her showgirl pals, Trixie and Polly, when the Great Depression kicks in and all the Broadway shows close down. Wealthy songwriter Brad saves the day by funding a new Depression-themed musical for the girls to star in, but when his stuffy high-society brother finds out and threatens to disown Brad, Carol and her gold-digging friends scheme to keep the show going, hooking a couple of millionaires along the way.
Joan Blondell Aline MacMahon Ruby Keeler Dick Powell Warren William Guy Kibbee Ned Sparks Ginger Rogers Etta Moten Charles C. Wilson Busby Berkeley Charles Lane Billy Barty Tammany Young Maynard Holmes Sterling Holloway Ferdinand Gottschalk Theresa Harris Fred 'Snowflake' Toones Virginia Dabney Jayne Shadduck Bee Stevens Anita Thomson Dorothy Coonan Wellman Jane Wyman Joan Barclay Patricia Douglas Dennis O'Keefe Bill Elliott
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USA
Denver, Colorado
USANR
USA
"What's the show about?"
"It's all about the Depression."
"... We won't have to rehearse that."
It's arguably the most heightened and heartbreaking evocation of the Great Depression ever filmed: an unforgettable portrait of a people betrayed by their country, gripped by a crisis not of their making, disillusioned, dehumanised and dismissed. Rife with righteous fury, dripping with anguish, and populated by marching masses almost zombified by hopelessness, it's a piece of socialist art pitched somewhere between poetry and propaganda. And it's a number in an otherwise innocuous Hollywood musical from 1933.
For most of its running time, Gold Diggers of 1933 is a standard crowd-pleaser. Though its first half has numerous wry references to poverty, one chilling line from Aline MacMahon about the lengths to which out-of-work chorus girls might be forced to go, and…
90
(16mm)
Three films in one: A depression-era comedy, a wacko screwball farce, and a backstage musical of abstraction. Each piece is miraculous, and defines pre-code Hollywood as a spectacle of skin and melancholy, of dazzlement and embracing the inevitable. Key sub-plot revolves around a young songwriter who, after giving 15,000 dollars to a struggling theatre company, is accused of robbing a bank. Turns out he's just rich.
The promise of what the Hollywood dream factory could have been: adult in its portrayal of sex, socially relevant, and artistically on the bleeding edge. That the same movie has a bawdy ode to PDA called "Pettin' in the Park" and a plea to remember downtrodden veterans is so unthinkably from a different time. Imagine a Hollywood production today that has romantic comedy and a section alerting you to the high suicide rates in Iraq War veterans... hard to even fathom. Those Busby Berkeley numbers are other worldly. They transport you from the perspective of an audience watching a stage number into some weird art space full of symmetry, motion and fantastic light.
this movie has everything
-gold diggers
-lewd and suggestive dialogue
-scamming
-side boob
-nipple
-full nudity (in sihouette)
-neon glowing violins
-roller skating baby
-woman getting married while dressed as a police officer
-guy using a can opener to remove a girl’s aluminum dress
-grand finale song and dance number about how America exploited a generation for war and then cast them aside to starve during the Great Depression
Joan Blondell, Warren William, Aline MacMahon and Ruby Keeler star in Mervyn LeRoy’s classic musical comedy about a group of struggling showgirls and their exploits while trying to keep their Broadway show running.
Busby Berkeley’s inventive numbers still hold up almost 90 years on, with the Forgotten Man segment in particular standing as one of the best musical sequences Hollywood ever made. It’s an incredibly powerful lament for the soldiers who went to war and returned to apathy from the same government who sent them off in the first place, this stinging indictment of the recently finished Hoover administration filled with overwhelmingly impactful imagery that could just as well apply to the way we treat veterans even in the present…
I just read Mick LaSalle's 'Dangerous Men, pre-code Hollywood and the birth of the modern man' and it had an extended sequence on this movie that both attempted to capture the way the Forgotten Man routine is a culmination of pre-code Warners and makes a case for the flighty, funny, soak the rich, a secret millionaire in every stairwell; $10000 gets you a night with Joan Blondell, whereas $15000 gets you rollerskating pea shooting infants; girls in lingerie that requires tin openers and a hundred flourescent violins fantasy in between the first and last scenes being just that, a knowing fantasy in a world gone mad.
The movie opens with Ginger Rogers dressed in an gold coin outfit reminiscent of…
one of the ultimate examples of the original warner bros. style: this has the semi-cheapo downtrodden depression-era grit of their tough-guy gangster films, but brilliantly contrasted with busby berkeley's heavenly musical numbers, which take the ever-present sadness of the era and convert it into silly pre-code innuendo and expressionist surrealism. gold diggers is a great have-your-cake-and-eat-it movie; it's got wit, extravagance, social relevance, laughs, entertainment, beauty, cynicism, and romance; the magickal dream-pact of hollywood fulfilled.
"Gold Diggers of 1933" is a 1933 musical directed by Mervyn LeRoy in primary standing but also with Busby Berkeley getting a nod as well. As this pre-code musical bounces between narrative direction handled by LeRoy and the staged ensemble from Berkeley, the film circulates the on-stage and behind stage energy of a Broadway play in its truest form. It uses the formulation of a famous performance of the time, "The Gold Diggers" which began its rendition in 1919, even with a silent version of "The Gold Diggers" (1923), and another musical version, "Gold Diggers of Broadway" (1929). At this point, "Gold Diggers of 1933" is something of a standard tradition for audiences of the time of its release, being…
I've accepted that I am just never going to be that into Busby Berkeley, but man alive did I adore the middle section of this, in which the actual gold digging takes place and a near-screwball comedy breaks out. In that section of the film, Joan Blondell and Warren William get to be amazing together (again), Aline MacMahon gets a rare role worthy of her talents, and Dick Powell gets to have the delightful, asshole moments that are always lurking in his early, good boy roles. Add Guy Kibbee and a pekingese to that quartet and I'm pretty much in heaven.
Getting to watch MacMahon dominate the screen with such command and confidence is always wonderful, and the fact that…
