Background
Busby Berkeley was born on 29 November 1895 in Los Angeles.
Busby Berkeley was born on 29 November 1895 in Los Angeles.
Berkeley was more a dance director than a director—for all that They Made Me a Criminal is a solid John Garfield vehicle. Berkeley was a lyricist of eroticism, the highangle shot, and the moving camera; he made it explicit that when the camera moves it has the thrust of the sexual act with it.
It is only remarkable that some viewers smile on what they consider the “period charm” of such libertinage.
As an official dance director, he worked on Whoopee (30. Thornton Freeland); Kiki (31, Sam Tavlor); Palmy Dai/s (31, Edward Sutherland); Flying High (31, Charles Reisner); Night World (32, Hobart Henley); Bird of Paradise (32, King Vidor); The Kid from Spain (32, Leo McCarey); 42nd Street (33, Lloyd Bacon); Gold Diggers of 1933 (33, Mervyn Le Boy); Footlight Parade (33, Bacon); Roman Scandals (33, Frank Tuttle); Wonder Bar (34, Bacon); Fashions of 1934 (34, William Dieterle); Twenty Million Siveethearts (34, Ray Enright); Dames (34, Enright); Go Into Your Dance (35, Archie Mayo); In Caliente (35, Bacon); Stars Over Broadway (35, William Keigh- lev); Gold Diggers of 1937 (36, Bacon); Singing Matine (37, Enright); Varsity Show (37, Keighley); Gold Diggers in Paris (38, Enright); Broadway Serenade (39, Robert Z. Leonard); Ziegfcld Girl (41, Norman Z. McLeod); Lady Be Good (41. McLeod); Born to Sing (41, Edward Ludwig); Girl Crazy (43, Norman Taurog); Two Weeks— With Love (50. Roy Rowland); Call Me Mister (51, Bacon); Two Tickets to Broadway (51, James V. Kern); Billion Dollar Mermaid (52, Le Roy);
Sniall Town Girl (53, Leslie Kardos); Easy to Love (53, Charles Walters); Rose Marie (54, Le Roy); and Billy Rose’s Jumbo (62, Walters).
It is notable that his Warners films are more downright suggestive than most of the films made after his move to MGM in 1939. The Gang’s All Here is a surrealist escape, but at Warners he kept a lofty survey over lagoons of water-lilies opening and closing with delirious facility. At MGM, he had to abide by the unambiguous view of teenagers impersonated by Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland: Innuendo and the O were beaten out of doors by Mr. Mayer and his prim lion.
Busbv Berkeley’s was the cool gaze that made an endlessly flowering O in those Warner Brothers dance routines. As Jean Comolli argued, Berkeley is not a choreographer: people do not dance in his films, they evolve, they move about, they make a circle, the circle tightens or is released, bursts forward and forms again.
The syntactical unit of this ballet of images is not the pas de deux but the pas de mille, the dance of a thousand. And one can suspect Busby Berkeley of having given himself the ballet as an alibi for his mad frenzy— ... to show in all possible fashions, in all situations and playing all parts, the largest possible number of uniformly dressed blonde girls, in the splendor of an impeccable alignment of their legs, making love in all the fan of poses with a shameless camera that forces the imagination to the point of passing, dollying in, under the arch of their thighs stretched out infinitely, forming a tunnel of dreams where it was desirable, once at least, that the cinema be engulfed.