BUSBY BERKELEY’S PERSONALIZED BEAUTY

Busby Berkeley is one of the few directors whose name is synonymous with, and instantly evocative of, a style—namely, musical production numbers featuring undulating masses of geometrically arrayed dancers, photographed from angles that turn their physiques into abstractions. But Berkeley, whose movie was at its most robust from 1930 through the early fifties, is more than the inventor of that emblematic style; he’s a cinematic philosopher whose symbolic inventions bear and develop ideas and intimations that Hollywood movies, facing public mores and self-censorship, would have had trouble unfolding dramatically. Those ideas involve sex; his main idea is the embodiment of desire in the very modes and norms of social life that channel and impede its expression and satisfaction.

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Berkeley’s work is the subject of a retrospective at Film Forum that starts today and runs through December 15th; that series is anchored by a batch of films that could be called his Magnificent Seven. Those seven films—five Warner Bros. musicals from the early nineteen-thirties (“42nd Street,” “Footlight Parade,” “Gold Diggers of 1933,” “Dames,” and “Gold Diggers of 1935”), plus two wartime films from the early forties (a fascinating outlier, “For Me and My Gal,” and, above all, his masterpiece, “The Gang’s All Here”)—form the core of his body of work and reveal the essence of his work with the body. In these films, Berkeley breaks the order of familiar shapes and figures, from the face of the city to the human face to the very notion of identity, into a surging cinematic molecular flow of hidden forces and abstract energies that suggests an other-world coextensive with the one that appears to the eye.

But Berkeley’s idealizing labors are themselves creations of a unique and intensely personalized beauty, a reflection of his own extraordinary and intimate sense of style, which he creates by wielding the mighty and weighty machinery of studio-era filmmaking—camera cranes, klieg lights, mechanized and mobilized sets built to the scale of hangar-like soundstages—like a paintbrush. What’s more, Berkeley, the master of organized crowd scenes, was also the master of the dance for two, or even for one dancer alone. I recently wrote in the magazine about this aspect of his artistry and a few of the more obscure—and, for the most part, lesser—films in which it’s displayed.

One of the odd aspects of Berkeley’s career is that, although he created the apotheosis of the dance in cinema, both in huge production numbers that defy theatrical space and in diegetic ballroom scenes, he wanted to direct movies above all, and contractually insisted on directing some musicals in their entirety (including their non-musical scenes of comedy and drama) as well as movies that weren’t musicals at all. He divided his career between directing production numbers for movies whose comedic and dramatic scenes were overseen by other directors, directing full movie musicals, and directing non-musicals. The quality of the films that he worked on is widely variable. Most of his non-musicals are clumsy and sodden affairs that offer little trace of personal style or artistic originality, though I think that they do have two distinctive characteristics—a particularly hectic way of actors talking and moving through the sets, and an occasional touch of illumination in scenes involving the theatre.

Berkeley, born in 1895, was, so to speak, born in a trunk; his mother was an actress, he grew up in the milieu of the theatre, he first went onstage as a child, and he was a busy Broadway choreographer, in the nineteen-twenties, before being summoned to Hollywood to create the musical sequences for the 1930 movie adaptation of Eddie Cantor’s Broadway hit “Whoopee!” He knew the backstage and onstage world intimately and was, for the most part, at his dramatic and comedic best when filming stories set in and around the theatre—and unfortunately the best of his non-musical productions aren’t featured in Film Forum’s retrospective.

As welcome as the Film Forum series is, it doesn’t offer much of interest beyond the Magnificent Seven; the most remarkable moment in the more obscure films featured there comes in the midst of a number that Berkeley created for the 1932 gangster romance “Night World” (Dec. 12), directed dully by Hobart Henley. In that scene, during a night-club dance to the forgettably bouncy tune “Who’s Your Little Who-Zis?,” female dancers are onstage with their legs spread, and the camera peers between them (a trope that Berkeley would often repeat)—but now Berkeley adds a twist of sordid comedy that lays bare his own obsessions. While dancing, the chorines chat with each other about members of the audience; one says to the other, “There’s Pop Goldberg again,” and another responds, “Yeah, the more he comes here, the lower he gets”—at which point Berkeley’s camera shows a porcine night-club patron crouching on the floor, at the level of the camera, leeringly looking between the dancers’ legs, exactly as the camera is doing.

The Film Forum series omits much of the best of Berkeley’s secondary work, like his effervescent elbows-out comedy “Bright Lights,” from 1935. That film stars the former circus performer and vaudevillian Joe E. Brown (best remembered for uttering the fadeout line in “Some Like It Hot”: “Well, nobody’s perfect!”) and the tremulous melodramatist Ann Dvorak (a star of Howard Hawks’s “Scarface,” who had less of a career than her talent merited), spotlighting Brown in some sharply filmed bumptious scenes of comedy and acrobatics. Berkeley also created the stupendous aquatic production number from “Easy to Love” (1953), which features Esther Williams—waterskiing, not swimming, this time—and a helicopter and dozens of other skiers, gliding among waterspouts on a vast open lake; the sequence is filmed from overhead in a musical extravagance on a seemingly oceanic scale. There’s also the 1951 musical “Small Town Girl,” which features three of Berkeley’s finest production numbers—one for Bobby Van by himself in a store, one for Bobby Van bouncing like a human pogo stick among the sites and strollers of the town in question, and one Man Ray-like vision for Ann Miller, who tap-dances with furious intent through a hallucination of disembodied musical instruments.

Berkeley’s back catalogue also boasts an extraordinary pre-Code drama of ordinary obscenity, “She Had to Say Yes,” from 1933. It was Berkeley’s first film as a dramatic director (he actually co-directed, with George Amy), and, in its frank depiction of sexual conflicts, it’s a prime example of the kind of dramatic clarity that was suppressed with the enforcement of the Hays Code, in 1934. Many great symbolic masterworks arose as a result of the Code—such directors as Howard Hawks, Ernst Lubitsch, and Berkeley himself managed to express the inexpressible with allusive and ironic ingenuity. “She Had to Say Yes” doesn’t reflect much in the way of cinematic artistry, but its script and performances have a documentary-like force in their depiction of the life of a “customer’s girl”—a female employee coaxed or coerced by her bosses (men, of course) to entertain out-of-town buyers (men, of course) who expect to be provided women in exchange for their lucrative orders. Loretta Young (who was twenty during filming) stars as a young woman who’s smart, sincere, skillful, and ambitious in business, and who finds herself pushed into that uneasy position. The movie also features the sharp-tongued character actress Winnie Lightner, who engages Young in the following exchange:

“I’ve never been able to get it through my thick skull what you ever saw in Tommy Nelson in the first place . . .”

“He was different once.”

“So was the Republican Party.”

The depiction of rampant and unquestioned sexual harassment, the constant threat of rape, the cavalier and ironclad assumptions about women’s character and motives, the rigidly stratified and sexualized workplace—all the monstrosities of daily life at the time (which, of course, aren’t merely matters of history)—should suffice to dispel any nostalgia, and provide a crucial reminder, if any were needed, of the oppressions and injustices that are central to the goals of politicians and voters hoping to flip the calendar back.

For that matter, it should dispel viewers’ nostalgia for the world that gave rise to Berkeley’s creations and other cinematic masterworks of the time. Berkeley’s films are replete with blackface, yellowface, ethnic humor, homophobic mockery, and near-nudity for women alone. He wasn’t the only stunted genius of the studio system; more or less, the entire system depended upon its limits. Cinematic classicism was built upon unquestioned exclusions and assumptions, and the artistry of directors and actors tended to be as deep as it was narrow. (One of this year’s best movies, the Coen brothers’ “Hail, Caesar!,” makes that odd combination of qualities its very subject.) Above all, classic Hollywood is a specular toolbox which, when deployed self-consciously, offers modern filmmakers a set of devices, strategies, and attitudes with which to consider and transcend their own limits—and those of classical styles as well. That’s why neither Berkeley’s own incomparable signature methods nor any of the modes of Hollywood tradition can (or should) be replicated today.

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