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Showbiz's Solidarity Song, on stage Depression sufferers raise the Tower of Babel and bring down the asbestos curtain. The timbre fuses desperation and snap, "that gulch down there" might be Wall Street or Broadway. For the swarm of troupers hoping for a role in the production, audition consists mainly of lifting skirts: "Oh dear, not a calf in the cartload," cracks Anytime Annie (Ginger Rogers), her faux-cultured accent not quite masking a Bronx bleat. (Watching the rehearsals, Guy Kibbee gives a rich rendition of an exhausted fetishist: "After three weeks of this, a leg ain't nothing but something to stand on.") To revive the musical is to ground it in the grime of the times, the theater exudes a ribald sweatshop atmosphere reeking of peroxide and swollen toes. The juvenile tenor (Dick Powell) resembles an inflamed ventriloquist dummy, gangsters and casting couches are never far, the leading lady (Bebe Daniels) is replaced by a sniffling tap-dancer (Ruby Keeler). Out of all this comes the sublime absurdity of the spectacle, the careful building of the realistic proscenium exploded by swooping cinematic music. (To tell when Busby Berkeley takes over from Lloyd Bacon, observe the low-angled camera that looks up the chorines' dresses as they kick onto the stage.) "Shuffle Off to Buffalo" is a horizontal scan across a Pullman car humming with impending hanky-panky, "Young and Healthy" rotates white furs against black backgrounds and dives through a tunnel of spread gams. Finally, the titular number dreams of New York à la Murnau's vamp in Sunrise, everybody and everything bouncing like Fleischer toons until a murder takes place and "Slaughter on Tenth Avenue" is born. His work complete, the director (Warner Baxter) chews on a sour cigarette in the alley (cf. Godard's For Ever Mozart). With George Brent, Una Merkel, Allen Jenkins, George E. Stone, Ned Sparks, Robert McWade, and Eddie Nugent. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |