This 1943 musical by Busby Berkeley (which I discuss in the clip below) opens with a jaw-dropping flourish (even to aficionados of his prior feats of cinematic acrobatics): a three-minute-and-twenty-second crane shot that flows from a singer’s pinpoint-lighted face to an abstract pattern of diagonal lines that’s soon revealed to be ropes on a New York dock, where an ocean liner is disgorging its goods and passengers, one of whom turns up at the bottom of a motley batch of produce: Carmen Miranda, who then goes into her song and dance, joined by a host of performers, including the bandleader Phil Baker, in a place that turns out to be the nightclub where the action has ostensibly been taking place. That Berkeley is the most imaginative director of musical numbers is self-evident. That he had a singularly choreographic approach to filming music and dance is true, if less apparent—but equally important. That all of his virtuosity and inventiveness are not merely ornamental but, fundamentally, philosophical, in the most specific sense, is the crucial matter. We’re accustomed to thinking in words, but Berkeley, whose book learning may not have been extensive, thinks in images, and those images bring to mind ideas which, though they can be formulated in words, derive a distinctively memorable meaning from being seen.
Berkeley is, in effect, a sociobiologist, who, in his production numbers, attempts to relate social behavior to instinctive drives. In a Freudian age, he saw personality as the human face of inhuman forces, and the gaiety of his stagings suggests the blithe detachment of the thinker in the face of implacable discoveries.
Oh, the story? Strangely, this fairly conventional wartime musical—in which the Wall Street heir Andy Mason (James Ellison) plots to abandon a Wall Street heiress (Sheila Ryan) for a humble showgirl (Alice Faye)—suggests an equally subtle point, regarding exogamy (which finds itself replicated in the movie’s final production number). In his earliest films (such as “Whoopee!,” “42nd Street,” and “Footlight Parade”), Berkeley directed only the musical sequences; here, he directed the whole movie, and integrates its plot and its themes into his visual vocabulary.
Berkeley’s direction of the entire movie brings an additional benefit: in an era in which Fred Astaire insisted on being filmed head-on, in the most boringly stagy way imaginable, Berkeley, a master of motion and abstraction, understood how to make dance distinctively cinematic, and he proves it here, in his use of light, shadow, and angle in the ballroom dances of Tony De Marco and his various partners. He does the same with music, turning performances by Benny Goodman and the big band into rhythmic visual spectacles worthy of the sonic swing. The fashions and the social aspects of “The Gang’s All Here” can be precisely dated; the brilliant visual imagination at work there has yet to be assimilated.
