![]() ![]() ![]() Gold-digging chorus girls, goggle-eyed sugar daddies, old pros and young hopefuls are all here, as is the notion that the eager understudy might get her big break, should the star be so obliging as to break her leg. ZanuckĤ2nd Street surely cannot be the first puttin'-on-a-show backstage Broadway spectacle but it's the one that's become known as the archetype. Written by Rian James, James Seymour from a novel by Bradford Ropes Starring Warner Baxter, Bebe Daniels, George Brent, Ruby Keeler, Guy Kibbee, Una Merkel, Ginger Rogers, Ned Sparks, Dick Powell, Allen Jenkins The shows may not be everyone's cup of tea - but artists and surrealists tend to love them.Ī compilation of individual Busby Berkeley numbers became a popular laser disc from about ten years ago this new Busby Berkeley Collection DVD boxed set has five of Berkeley's top titles and a bonus disc replicating most of the contents of the old laser. So far out of style that they form a style of their own, his amazing musical numbers are now revered as 'music videos' on a colossal scale: outlandish, sexually-charged surreal masterpieces. His films found new life on college campuses in the 1970s. The memory of these pictures faded as America entered the war, and it wasn't until the middle 1960s that the Busby Berkeley flag was picked up by kitsch 'n' Camp-loving movie revivalist culture. Those moguls must have thought Berkeley was some kind of crazy genius. The home of Rin-Tin-Tin got more than it bargained for, because Berkeley combined stagecraft cleverness, camera tricks and his own visual ideas to create musical numbers that were wholly cinematic: they could only exist on a screen, and nobody had ever put visuals like his on a screen anywhere. Berkeley had contributed to Goldwyn's Eddie Cantor pictures but it was Warners that gave him the creative go-ahead. 42nd Street, Gold Diggers of 1933, Footlight Parade, Dames, Gold Diggers of 1935, The Busby Berkeley Discīusby Berkeley's phantasmagorical musical extravaganzas were a highlight of 1930s culture, a bridge between the insufferably literal stage transpositions of the talkie transition and the later star-centered musical formulas at RKO and MGM. ![]()
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