Gold Diggers of 1933

Four brassy showgirls conspire to marry wealthy men. The women are brash, gorgeous, and self-confident, but the Great Depression has brought them to their knees. In the film's second sequence, we see three of them huddled in bed together, apparently weakened by starvation (later, we learn that they have been reduced to stealing food) and too despondent to get up to face the gloomy world. A show in which they have chorus-girl parts has been closed for non-payment of debts -- goons waving a writ of execution appear in the middle of a splashy dance number. As it happens, the crooner across the air-shaft at their flat is the scion of a wealthy Boston family. Although his staid brother wants him to become a banker, he yearns for the bright lights of the Great White Way. With family money,the crooner finances a spectacular Broadway musical. When his brother and his plump bald lawyer appear in New York to bring the crooner to his senses, romance ensues and three of the showgirls end up married to millionaires or their retainers: the crooner, the bald, secretly romantic lawyer, and the sober, ferocious brother who has come to redeem the family honor all get lucky: the women are Ginger Rogers, Joan Blondell, Ruby Keeler, and Aline McMahon; Dick Powell plays the crooner. (The women are unbelievably beautiful in the archaic silent film manner -- they have milk-white skin and enormous eyes and they act with their eyes -- this is evident in the opening shots of Ginger Rogers who rolls her eyes and darts them back and forth avariciously; she makes her eyes quiver and dance just as much as body.) The film is justly famous for the indescribeably strange and surreal Busby Berkeley dance numbers, lavish spectacles that seem to begin as transcripts of Broadway choreography but end at the very outer limits of cinema itself -- these sequences deploy hundreds of dancers across an apparently infinite space through which the camera swoops and glides and ascends overhead to show geometric patterns of undulating women. The comedy plot in the movie is filmed theatrically, against shallow Art Deco sets, and, although conventional, is sufficiently ingenious and well-acted to maintain the audience's attention between the episodes of surreal erotic fantasmagoria that Berkely designs. The interpretive difficulty that the movie poses, a problem as severe and baffling as anything in the avant-garde cinema, is the connection between the lavish and bizarre dance numbers that comprise about a third of the film and the brassy, screwball comedy plot appended to those sequences. The notion of sex and the Depression and wish-fulfillment may be cited, I suppose, to bridge the gap between the brittle comedy of manners that comprises the film's plot, overtly theatrical material that is almost Brechtian in its bitterness and sardonicism, and the choreographed spectacle that periodically erupts into the film -- but the connection is tenuous, at best, and the viewer should probably simply accept the fact that the movie fuses two styles and visual vocabularies that can't be reconciled. It is like Freud's notion of the unconscious coexisting with our egos -- the two systems of meaning are completely detached from one another and, in fact, mostly mutually inaccessible. "Gold Diggers of 1933" shows a velvety, orgasmic fantasy world that exists in parallel with our reality -- the two universes intersect in our imagination but don't necessarily comment on one another. The film begins with Ginger Rogers' platinum face hidden behind a huge coin. When the camera tracks backward, we see that she is naked except for strings of gold coins strategically placed on her shimmying body. She sings "We're in the Money," inexplicably performing one stanza and chorus in pig-Latin. The equation between sex and gold is established initially, but, then, the film retracts onto a stage-set where themes of poverty and desperation are dramatized. "Petting in the Park" is a pre-Code dance number that is explicitly about sex -- it is the best dance in the show because it features the manic Billy Barty, a dwarf playing a malevolent baby. The baby, who seems to represent the risks of sex, affords a "punctum" -- that is, a weirdly destabilizing point of interest among Berkeley's labyrinths of interlocked lovers and like Puck in "A Midsummer Night's Dream" seems to stage-manage the sexual fantasy. The next dance number features columns of half-naked girls with neon-lit violins swaying and prancing on a huge Moebius-shaped stairway -- these images are almost completely abstract, vast close-ups poised against a velvet-black void. The musical concludes with the curiously proto-Fascist "The Forgotten Man", a dark number featuring legions of men marching in rain and fog, wounded soldiers limping from the battlefield and, finally, a series of huge concentric arches in which troops march and posture while the entire cast moves toward the camera, arms raised as if in a Roman salute. It's an image straight from the choreographed battles of labor and management in Fritz Lang's "Metropolis" and concludes the film on a curiously distraught note.