I have access to a preposterously large number of movies. I’ve decided to take a random number generator, pick a movie, watch it, and write about it. Today’s film: The Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933).
Busby Berkeley didn’t live in our world.
If you watch a film from his universe, you will see a song and dance spectacular that can’t exist. The camera weaves in and out, up and under the scene. Dancers take elaborate forms and move as though they are a kaleidoscope. The editing creates nothing but impossibilities, cutting between environments, scenes, and dance numbers. He doesn’t create reality, he creates fantasy.
The spell is only broken when you realize that this is supposed to be a Broadway show, and if this was reality nobody in the theater would be enjoying it. They couldn’t, it would just be a bunch of women with neon violins moving back and forth. The power is gained from the choreography of the camera, as well as the dancers. Then the violin-wielding women become a giant violin, and it should be absurd, but it works in the reality of Berkeley.
Maybe all musicals exist in this world, our imagination grabbing onto the music and taking us to places only suggested by the stage. Maybe it’s just what happens when some people get high - I just get sleepy and forgetful. But here we have something directly from another planet, endlessly referenced by others but never done nearly as well as the original.
Gold Diggers of 1933 - a loose remake of the lost Gold Diggers of Broadway - is about putting on a show. That was a standard plot of early musicals. It’s not a musical where the songs really tell the story - though they do tell stories, the ending Forgotten Man sequence being the most poignant, about the men of America facing the Great Depression - but because it’s a musical they need to be there, because that’s why we’re here. We’re putting on a show, and even if I can’t entirely tell what this show is. The number about fucking - sorry, petting - in the park doesn’t seem like it’s in the same musical as the one featuring men returning from the first World War shattered and bleeding.
That said, at least in this case, there is a story outside of the musical spectacular. It’s a light one, and it floats between directions until it finally settles on a farce about poor dancers facing off against wealthy dipshits through the power of pretending to be someone else - some of the directions are more interesting than the film would ever go, like the show being financed by a bank robbery. It gets its kicks in as a piece of satire, and it is both very witty and extremely horny. It’s also not entirely straight - though a musical rarely is. Berkeley only did the dance numbers, the rest of the story was handled by Mervyn LeRoy - who did the definitely-not-straight Little Caesar and the Wizard of Oz, which is a bit of a gay touchstone. It shows up in stray lines and in hero Brad (Dick Powell) being the difficult little brother who loves music, but there are many moments where you go “someone here wasn’t straight and they were laughing about this.”
This is just a very easy movie to sell. The title itself is basically “look, you liked the Gold Diggers, here’s a new one, what else do you want?” You get “We’re In the Money,” a song that originated here, and is still referenced to this day. You get famous people being charming, you get elaborate song and dance numbers, you get the outline of a nipple. It’s everything you want and more!
You expect it to be a bit cheap and shameless, just because of the title. It's a remake - albeit a loose one - and they just went “screw it, let's put the year in the title.” It does make things easier to sort when you're looking for it. Maybe “The Crow of 2024” would be a better title for that unnecessary remake - at a bare minimum, it would make it easier to separate it from the original.
But this is not just a cheap cash-in on popular trends, it’s an expensive and artistically justified cash-in on popular trends. You can watch it today, 91 years later, and still get the same excitement and joy that you did in 1933. The songs hold up, the story still charms, and it’s not racist - if you watch enough movies from the ‘30s, the fact that it’s not racist is a huge win. It's not a cynical remake at all, which puts it far ahead of stuff like The Crow of 2024. It might have been commissioned as a rehash, but the creative team actually bothered to do something with it.
Plus you get to visit the magical, beautiful world of Busby Berkely. The world that can only exist on screen, where a combination of a well-used camera and dancers create a kaleidoscopic fantasy. In the musical sequences, Gold Diggers of 1933 exists outside of reality, and sometimes that’s exactly what you want in a movie.