There were musicals both in movies and on Broadway that told tales of social significance before the song “Sing Me a Song of Social Significance” appeared in 1937 in the Broadway musical “Pins and Needles”. They go back, of course, to Kern and Hammerstein’s “Showboat” and even King Vidor’s silent movie, “Hallalujah!”, a film that takes the form of a musical of the sort that will be discussed here as much as it also embellished the form of the documentary. There are images of stooping field hands interspersed with images of rousing Church choirs that leave you asking which one of these is the true life of Negroes in the South. Forget about Gershwin’s “Of Thee I Sing” whose relation to politics is to the clichés told about politicians, and so is somewhat like Kaufman and Hart’s “Merton of the Movies”, which is a satire on the conventions of Hollywood as they are known from what were then the already well established conventionalized portrayals of Hollywood. First rate political satire such as is found in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” or in “Primary Colors” does not readily yield itself to the musical form because its métier is the rapture caused by political rhetoric, which has rhythms all its own.
I want to discuss the exemplary and extraordinary and very political musical made by Busby Berkeley in the Thirties for Warner Brothers: ”42nd Street”, “Gold Diggers of 1933” and “Gold Diggers of 1935”. It is worth noting that none of these got Oscars, any more than did the Rogers-Astaire musicals of the Thirties. Hollywood did not appreciate what it had created. The three movies are largely neglected, the first having given rise to a Broadway musical that took all of the bite out of the movie, reshaping it as the romance that it definitely was not, a genre that the original “42nd Street” was, in fact, meant to subvert. So the movies get lost in what was made of them, just as much of the sadness and regret of “Showboat”, as that was rendered by Irene Dunne and Michelle Morgan and Alan Jones and Paul Robeson in 1936, was lost when the roles were reprised, in Technicolor, by Katherine Grayson, Ava Gardner, Howard Keel and William Warfield, it still too risky, in 1951, to have Lena Horne play Enola. Now that would have been a political statement.
The three movies are also neglected because so much attention is paid to the over the top choreography and cinematography of Busby Berkeley that no one can take the three to be serious movies, what with the hokey plots, girls pretending to be bad when they are not, boys pretending to be bad when they are good, producers and directors pretending to be mean when they are not. You just want them to get on with the next musical number. And, anyway, if you take the movies seriously they come across as awfully cynical, and that is not what we want from a musical, at least until Sondheim. (Phil Silvers played the cynic for laughs in 1948’s “High Button Shoes”; you were supposed to see it as a convention, just the way Ado Annie in “Oklahoma” must have a heart of gold because she can’t really be loose rather than merely boy crazy, a stock categorization to which she admits in “I’m Just A Girl Who Can’t Say No”.)
Well, let us suspend judgment for a moment and look at what is displayed up there on the silver screen. “42nd Street” breaks into two parts, the backstage story of boys but mostly girls trying to stay employed in the middle of a Depression, and the musical they are putting on. The girls are mock cynical and a bit risqué, in that they are shown getting dressed and undressed which, if you think about it, is what all people do, but when it is was represented on the screen, that showed girls to be bad girls, sexual morality the sign of purity of soul. Ginger Rodgers plays “Anytime Annie” who is not just boy crazy but sufficiently sophisticated that she dolls herself up at the beginning of the movie as someone of a higher class and by the end of the movie is having Guy Kibbee take her pet dog for a walk, for reasons we understand, and so is a true gold digger.
The story of the musical is how to put on a show. It turns out that the female lead, Bebe Daniels, is in love with a hoofer who hasn’t made it; she gives him money on the side, though he has qualms about seeming to be a gigolo, especially since his girl friend is also seeing the backer of the show who admits toward the end of rehearsal that looking at the legs of chorus girls has lost its charm. The female lead is so stressed out that she gets drunk and breaks a leg, and the ingénue in the chorus line, Ruby Keeler, has to go on in her place, singing songs with the boy lead, Dick Powell, who she first met when she saw him in his BVD’s on the first day of rehearsal.
The story, it is clear, is engaged in euphemism. The females are virgins though not virginal and the men are out to use them, however much the men deny that such is their objective. The story contrives to have everyone pair up as they should, except the audience knows that means the gold diggers and their gents have each gotten their way.
The musical numbers are clearly fantastic, even to the point that all notion of a proscenium arch, under which the musical numbers are presumably performed, gives way to a purely cinematic effect that depends on overhead cameras zooming in and out of the frame of a shot so as to reveal chorus girl legs or pretty young faces or leering men. And yet it is the songs and the musical numbers that tell the truth about the relation of men to women. “Shuffling off to Buffalo” tells of a young couple taking the night train to Niagara Falls and so beginning their honeymoon on a train. They shyly put on their night clothes in the car bathrooms while a chorus of girls occupying both upper and lower berths sings of putting on your scanties and climbing into an upper birth. Girls are shy but eager; men are just eager. Romance is a dressed up and stylized version of lust. The truth of things is told in song, in stylized stage production, while the appearance of things is told in the language of plot narration, people pretending to be what they are not. The apotheosis of the movie is the lengthy “Lullaby of Broadway” number, where an unbelievably large polished stage filled with ordinary flats, including ones to represent the stores of Times Square and elevated tracks, is the setting for a saga of a “Broadway Baby” who plays (or works) all night long and goes to bed at dawn. The truth of Broadway is that being a show girl is being a working girl; it is a rough life.
The illusion of a story supposedly telling the truth while musical numbers which are supposedly mere throwaway affectations actually do tell the truth also obtains, and in much more developed style in “Gold Diggers of 1933”, the centerpiece and the best movie of the three. The story is about three chorus girls who need work because otherwise they would have to steal or do something worse. They are the representatives of all the unemployed, even if they work in a strange industry, “the show business”, as it is called. The young piano player and composer and singer across the hall, Dick Powell, who is smitten with one of the three, Ruby Keeler again, says he will raise money for the show, which he does, but does not say from where, and he does not intend to appear in the show until an emergency occurs when the juvenile male lead suffers lumbago, getting treatment in his underwear while the male and female leading figures look on, this being the show business after all, where you face up to the facts of life, including the one that says the show must go on, and so Dick Powell does, though he is recognized as the son of a millionaire (apparently, people who attend Broadway shows know millionaires because they are ones themselves), which is a bit better than the girls thought, who had sized him up as a criminal on the lam. Powell tells his uncle at a stuffy men’s club that he wants to play live music not the dead music of Beethoven, and so the hunt is on: Powell’s uncle accompanied by the ever available Guy Kibbee, who mimes a randy old man so well, the two them out to seduce the chorines and so save their young friend, while the chorines are out to seduce the rich old men because it serves them right to be taken. Everybody pairs off, the chorines presumably faking that they love the old goats and the old goats smitten out of all reason by the chorines, and Dick and Ruby, who pair both in the story and in the musical that takes place within the story.
What really happens in life, without the evasions that allow gold diggers and their sugar daddies to be treated as deep down nice people, is presented in the musical numbers. Two are particularly worth noting. “Petting in the Park” shows a midget dressed up as a baby leering at the girls who change their clothes, after they have been drenched by a shower, behind screens that show their moving shadows. They emerge in tin suits and the number ends with Dick Powell using a can opener to cut open the suit worn by a smiling Ruby Keeler. All clean fun, but not really; it is good dirty fun. Then there is “The Forgotten Man” number, where the fates of the veterans who returned from World War I and wound up as homeless are pantomimed and sung, particularly by Joan Blondell as a torch singer who also happens to be part of the threesome of gold diggers out to take advantage of Dick Powell’s rich friends. As a singer, she can tell the truth, showing the medal of an ex-soldier to a policeman who is about to move him on. The audience sees soldiers walking on a shiny stage people-mover so that it is aware that this is an illusion of war rather than an attempt at a representation of the real thing, the audience presumably more familiar with the conventions of theatrical display than with what happens in war. This is an anti-depression movie whose bitterness comes through precisely because its themes are played for their entertainment values: bedroom farce, young romance, production numbers.
Look at the third outing of this theme and this structure, “Gold Diggers of 1935”, much inferior in that there is too much plot, the characters are too broadly drawn, and there is not much new music. Dick Powell is back again, as the young man who can do no wrong however much wrong he does. It is still shocking to see him shake hands in this movie with his fiancé, breaking off on cordial terms after they have both found rich potential spouses. She had, in fact, encouraged him to be a gigolo and, as the hostess of a hotel, is said at the very start of the movie to know that there is no such thing as being insulted.
The opening numbers shows staff cleaning up a hotel to prepare it for its guests, quibbling about how to divvy up the tips, just as corrupt as Adolph Menjou, the Russian music director, who splits up four thirds of the investments in the show with his set designer and the hotel manager. There are plot elements here that will be revitalized by Mel Brooks in “The Producers”. The rich people in “Gold Diggers of 1935” are not any morally better than the working stiffs (while in the previous two musicals in the series the rich were distinctly morally inferior to the show people). A rich mother is trying to pawn her daughter off on an insufferable twit who wants to write a history of snuff boxes and who gets entangled with a stenographer who tricks him into supplying evidence for a breach of promise suit. This trope of rich twits who need to find girls to marry is a way to display the inequities of the class system, all of us to identify with the girls who give their all so as to strike it rich. The rich mother in “35” is as crass as the service people, herself forever calculating interest rates. There is therefore no aesthetically satisfying reversal whereby plots are rendered untrue. That is because the greed of all the social classes is front and center. And the musical numbers do not reveal anything about the plot—but oh, those musical numbers!
The main one is a reprise of the “Lullaby of Broadway” number from “42nd Street”, this time with no political message about being down and out. It is more about dream life, the Broadway Baby falling out a window at the end of the number, after people rushed her to admire her, as if she had dreamed she would come to no good end, a quasi-Freudian interpretation further justified by noting that the number begins with the Broadway Baby face emerging from a pinprick in a black background to take up the screen and she sings her song, her face disappearing, at the end, shrinking away, her face having first faded into and, at the end of the number, emerging out of a map of Manhattan. Busby Berkeley was just great, in all three musicals, in contrasting rich and multiply-hued blacks with white.
The most important image in the extended number is a sort of night club scene where an army of female dancers clad in black costumes that show off their white midriffs and white legs tap dance against an army of grayish clad male dancers and then blend between them, more like troops than like a symbolic representation of the meshing of the sexes. The stage is huge, a multi-leveled arrangement of slabs that allow for short sets of stairs (rather than the long staircases more familiar in Hollywood musicals) with Dick Powell sitting with his “date” on one high box, as if this were a nightclub where all this entertainment had been arranged for its single table. Such a fantasy can serve as the fantasy ne plus ultra for the café society depicted in the Thirties as the way rich people spent their time.
The hand movements of the dancers are somewhat salute like and remind this viewer, some seventy years later, that this movie was made soon after the Nazi rise to power, and the dance is not just Freudian: it is an appropriation of much grander and horrific fantasies for entertainment purposes. The movie appears the year after “The Triumph of the Will”. It suggests that there is a very different way of handling the suppressed feelings that burst through in German movie making as Freudian (“The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari”; “M”) or through horror films such as “Nosferatu” and as the at once sober and ecstatic Nazi politics of self-realization trumpeted by Leni Riefenstahl. Here, finally, for “Gold Diggers of 1935”, the musical production number becomes more real than even the morally corrosive plot of people just trying to make money, greed, sex now on the same level of petty finagling while bigger, much more massive, events are afoot.
European movies do not use this device of having the play within the movie play act as the vehicle for telling the truth. Eisenstein has Alexander Nevsky look out at the audience to give away that his warning of what happens to Germans who invade Russia holds for the time when the movie is being made and not just for the historical past. Perhaps only American filmmakers can rely on their audience having a wealth of knowledge about popular culture that can be used as reference points (“Yes, I remember watching that on the news at the time”) so that what is fictional validates as real the events being represented or reenacted on the screen. “This is the Army”, a World War II movie about soldiers putting on a traveling vaudeville show, presented the real Irving Berlin singing “I Can’t Get Up in the Morning”, dressed in doughboy khakis, just as he had done in World War I. Now that was a patriotic movie, however weak it was in a plot that starred what seem those old troopers, Ronald Reagan and George Murphy.
The tradition of the political musical faded out, perhaps because the Depression was over, and so the relation between the poor and the rich did not weigh on everyone’s mind.The short-lived tradition of politically charged musicals died out in movies after the Second World War, the musicals of the Freed/Minelli era at MGM dominated by sentimental and costume musicals starring the same Judy Garland who had put the kibosh on political musicals by making herself the eye gripping center of what otherwise might be thought the political populism that informed Frank Baum’s novel, “The Wizard of Oz”. “An American in Paris”, which in 1951 was the first musical to win an Academy Award for Best Picture, was not at all about politics. It was supposedly about art and artists, though Gene Kelly was about as un-bohemian as an artist can get. So the musical arrived at “respectability” by becoming middle-brow. “Singing in the Rain” is noteworthy because its plot does keep moving, fresh enough to have a movie executive portrayed as a good guy, and because it used ordinary sets such as a living room or a street on which it was raining as the background for its musical numbers. But it was decidedly non-political.
There are some few political musicals since the Thirties, which were, after all, eighty years ago, notably “Caberet”, which was about the impending Nazi Revolution as well as sleazy sex in the Weimar Republic. The most memorable image in that movie is not Joel Gray, however wonderful he is as the leering M.C. at the nightclub. The most memorable image is the closeup of an idealistic and very Aryan Nazi Youth singing “Tomorrow Belongs To Me”, with all that foretells. Mostly, though, sleaze has been treated in the time since the Thirties as entertaining rather than undercutting the values of the political system. “Chicago” has you imagine Rene Zellweger, Catherine Beta Jones and Richard Gere as ruthless people, but that is a game as non-serious as thinking that Sweeney Todd is about murder rather than a play on the grotesque. And “Hamilton”, which does reimagine the Founding Fathers as multicultural, has its points, but it has not yet been made into a movie and I find the music banal. I prefer Harry Warren, who composed for the three movies I have discussed, even though he is not among the pantheon of American Tin Pan Alley composers, which include Porter, Berlin, Gershwin, Kern and Rodgers, perhaps because he never did a smash hit Broadway show.