Triumph of the Will: as seen by Busby Berkeley

Come out, come out, come out and get your lovin'
Now don't you keep me in suspense
Come on, come on, we'll do our turtledovin'
Sittin' on a backyard fence

Come on, come on,
The little stars are peekin'
They're waiting for you to commence
Uh-huh, uh-huh, I kind of thought I'd weaken
Sittin' on a backyard fence

It may be just another little backyard alley
Off the avenue
But I can see a willow tree, a moonlit valley
In the dreams I share with you

Meow, meow, the kitty cat is cooin'
He shows a lot of common sense
He knows, he knows, there's always something doin'
Sittin' on a backyard fence!

This is only one of my favorite numbers from Footlight Parade, a classic Busby Berkeley musical from 1933. Pre-code, obviously, though this number is extremely mild compared to the hilariously charming Honeymoon Hotel, in which almost every line is full of double-entendres. But the tune is so lighthearted and the players so delightfully comedic that they get away with it. I can't find a whole version of HH, so can't post it here, and lyrics alone don't begin to get it. This little cat number, much simpler than the other three Berkeley blockbusters in this film, is a sort of warmup for the orgasmic bliss of the movie's last half-hour. And believe me, it IS orgasmic, even though I've had a few revelations about Berkeley lately that have opened my eyes.

I've seen his choreography, of course - anyone who likes old movies has, and my impression of it was always "classy kitsch". But then I couldn't help but notice the grace and precision of his dancers as they played phony violins or pianos in exact unison, or performed water ballet so perfectly synchronized it was a little bit frightening.

It IS a little bit frightening to see all this intentional, mass uniformity, and it fascinated me to find out a bit about Berkeley's background. He wasn't a dancer or a choreographer at all, wasn't even in show business. He was a drill sergeant in the army during World War I, an expert at forming precise military patterns with human bodies. This was some sort of mad genius drill sergeant, of course, and some of his visions are much darker than I realized.

I've just sent away to Amazon for a boxed set with some of his best-known stuff in it, but the one I'm looking forward to the most is Gold Diggers of 1935. His version of Lullaby of Broadway is so spooky that it's hard to see it as part of a musical at all. It's almost like a horror movie, with the singer's face starting as a tiny white dot in the middle of total blackness. Then like some toxic death-lily it gradually blooms and blooms until it dominates the screen in a way that is nothing short of macabre.

The dancing in this number is not like normal dancing, believe me. This isn't tap. I don't know what it is, but it includes aggressive arm-thrusting movements that at first look weird, then violent, then - like something out of the Third Reich. I am not exaggerating.

Hitler was well on his way by 1935, as was Leni Riefenstahl, chronichler of Hitler's rise in the infamous propoganda film, Triumph of the Will. But I was astonished to learn that, fascist as his choreography looked, it was not Berkeley who was influenced by Riefenstahl.

It was the other way around. Riefenstahl idolized American film, and American musicals in particular. She could not have failed to be dazzled by a choreographer who could get a couple hundred identical human beings to move around a stage in exact unison.

Berkeley didn't have a happy life. He married and divorced six times, killed three people in a drunken car accident, and at least once tried to commit suicide. For all that, he lived to be 80 years old. Such longevity is not always a great blessing in a person like that.

But he left these weird artifacts with their disturbing overtones. This little backyard fence number is nothing - except for a dwarf running around in a bizarre rat costume, and the inexplicably weird "thing" that Ruby Keeler rises out of and  dances around, a leering, winking, open-mouthed something that might be the moon, or something else.

Pettin' in the dark: pre-Code Hollywood

Gorgeous, in a pre-Code sort of way. The "little boy" is really a dwarf named Billy Barty.

Footlight Parade Redux: I can't wait to see it again!

And here are a few delicious gifs I made LAST time I saw it:

James Cagney and other cool cats

I promised you gifs, and here they are. It's a treat to watch Cagney dance like a cat, in a sinuous manner that is nevertheless always intensely masculine. Nobody else had a style even remotely like his, lending itself naturally to alley-cat leaps and predatory slinks. I see traces of his carnivorous style in Gene Kelly, who purposely seemed to take a step away from the elegance of Fred Astaire. Instead of whirling his gorgeously-gowned girl in the air, he'd lift her up by the inner thigh and let her slide down his body. (Gifs to follow. I promise.)

Ruby Keeler was always the star of these extravaganzas. It's strange, because she isn't nearly as beautiful as some of the other dancers - she's more sweet or cute than beautiful, like the girl you'd take to the drive-in (if they had them back then). She couldn't act, and her singing voice was pretty awful. But she could dance. And there was something about the way she inhabited her body, some indefinable quality. (Or maybe Busby was banging her, who knows.)

I love the choreography in the early musicals - it's about as hokey as it gets. How I wish I still had my YouTube video of Broadway Melody, the first big all-singing, all-dancing extravaganza of 1929. There was a luscious number in it called Wedding of the Painted Doll, and if I had it now I'd gif it to death.

Meow-meow-meow, chow-chow-chow. . . 

Classic Busby Berkeley. Imagine smiling like that for 17 takes.

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"Oh, you nasty man": lovely (pre-Code) Alice Faye

What you do while you're waiting (for something you REALLY want)

This was a pre-code 1930s cartoon, featuring a familiar player. . . who was soon to announce a new character. . .

Yes, it's true. . . Popeye rode piggyback on the sultry, near-nude Boopster until he convinced the world he was sexy enough to have a series of his own.

Very nice. . . but why does everyone keep bouncing up and down?

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Naked chicks on a plane: really cool GIFs!

Betty Boop - she's such a bitch

The cartoons I used to watch very early on Saturday mornings (I mean before the REAL cartoons came on, like Huckleberry Hound and Bullwinkle and Linus the Lion-Hearted) were way, way old. I mean, these barely had any talking in them, mostly just wacky music from some distant era, and I loved them.

There was something called Tarrytoons, early Warner Brothers cartoons called Merrie Melodies, very old Disney (I particularly remember "Bugs in Love"), and of course ancient Popeye, a figure so coarse and ugly he should have scared me. Not only was he smoking a pipe, one of his eyes really was popped out!

At the end of these antique Popeyes there was just a split-second glimpse of an inkwell, trademark of the animator Max Fleischer (video posted above). As a kid I used to wonder if I was imagining it, it was over so quick. I thought it was magical. Much later, when my kids and I got into the habit of taping bizarre old cartoons, we used to try to freeze-frame on it, usually with no success.

But before Popeye, even, there was Betty Boop, a frenetic little sexpot hallucinated by the Fleischer studio. These cartoons had a fever dream quality combined with non-stop, manic activity. The characters, as far as I could make out, were all animals, some of them very hard to identify. (And let's not get into that Goofy versus Pluto debate, and how a mouse could own a dog.) When they first brought out Betty Boop in the surreal Dizzy Dishes - she isn't even named but just sort of appears standing on a table - it all gets very strange, indeed.

 

It gets very strange because Betty has bulldog jowls,long pendulous ears, and a snout that keeps popping out grotesquely. Betty either has some sort of bizarre facial deformity, or else. . .

She's a dog.

A dog wearing garters and high heels. In other words, a bitch.

In subsequent cartoons the animators decided to turn her into a human being, making her flappy ears into earrings that still looked suspiciously canine. Mae Questel's squeaky voiceovers helped bring her decidedly flaky character into focus. 

People have come out with all sorts of boopery about this subject: how Betty reflected the morals and mores of the times, how her barely-there skirt (always showing at least one garter) and wispy top, which sometimes fell off altogether, illustrated the daring style and energy of the madcap twenties and early '30s. Turner Classics made a whole documentary about this, about pre-Code Hollywood and the racy, suggestive language and dress that was common in movies before Will Hays and the suffocating legion of "decency" (read: sexless repression) shut it all down.

You can see what happened to Betty over the years, and it's alarming: her barely-there dress evolves into a suffocating uniform, completely destroying her giggly, girlish flapper/vamp image. But the thing to remember about Betty is, she was a caricature right from the start.

If anyone had a head that size, for one thing, they'd bloody fall over. (Though note that the later Boop incarnation shows a head much more in proportion with her body.) Her huge eyes with their fans for lashes are almost scary. She's a sexpot who jumps out of an inkwell, but she might as well be jumping out of a cake at some LSD-inspired stag party. 

You have to ask yourself: was this character really created for children? Cartoons started off as general entertainment, a way of padding out the bill (you really got your money's worth in those days), usually shown with a movie feature or double-bill along with the newsreel and short subject. People had longer attention spans in those days and could stand to sit in a theatre for three or four hours.

If the movie was adult in nature, then - most likely - so were the cartoons. In the early 30s, this trampy little vamp ran around in her nearly-nothings, showing cleavage, having little "accidents" that tore her clothes away entirely so she had to dive behind something.
Meant for kids? Though it was hardly Fritz the Cat, I doubt it.

Somewhere along the line, maybe when TV came in, cartoons began to gravitate kidward and grow more tame. I never even saw most of the outrageous Boop cartoons I've found on YouTube: they must have been banned as unwholesome. Don't want innocent 8-year-old boys having fantasies about some trampy little tart!

Betty Boop Cartoon Banned For Drug Use 1934

This is all a little unbelievable, like most early cartoons. Not to mention a little nightmarish. At least Betty looks like a girl: in her first couple of appearances she was a dog with long ears and a snout that popped out from time to time. The animators didn't quite know what to do with her.

After a few episodes she became a sexpot. It's interesting to watch the evolution of her costumes: here, in pre-code Hollywood, she was so scantily clad that you occasionally caught flickers of bare breasts (a wardrobe malfunction, perhaps) and, in her saucily flipped-up hemline, the delta of Venus. By the mid-30s the censors had clamped down, and by wartime she looked like a no-nonsense Army nurse with twill jackets and skirts below the knee.

These were Max Fleischer cartoons, some of the strangest things ever made, and they evolved into Popeye which ran forever but also ran out of steam around the time of the war. Then they became patriotic bullshit and propaganda, and never quite recovered. I like the fact that these characters are all a little hideous, a little smudgy, and almost psychotic in their unpredictable behaviour. By the end they all get stoned, sucking up nitrous oxide like a dentist who has fallen off the rails.

Were cartoons really made for children? I don't think so. They were shown along with movies (there'd be a newsreel, a cartoon, a short subject, and the main feature: or perhaps two), later sent overseas to bolster the morale of the troops. The studios cranked out hundreds and even thousands of them: Disney and Warner Brothers were the big guns, but then you had weirdball Fleischer and, a little later, Bob Clampett with his bizarre puppets-brought-to-animated-life, Beany and Cecil.

This just gets more unbelievable as you watch. Maybe the animators WERE on something.

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Flying Down to Rio, the hard way

Just discovered this at the end of an otherwise-unremarkable old '30s musical, Flying Down to Rio. I started watching it coz it had Fred and Ginger in it, but as it turned out they were only in it for about 3 minutes, doing one dance number that wasn't anywhere near their best. This was their first movie turn however, and they stole the show.

That said, I was about to ditch the thing in boredom when THIS incredible sequence came on. It's almost surreal in its gleeful beauty, with sexy but innocent young women cavorting on the wings of planes. If you look closely at 1:33, you'll notice some of the girls suddenly lose their dresses in the breeze and continue their wriggly dance, apparently, in their birthday suits. At 1:45, you'll see that their shirts are practically transparent, no bras on underneath. We'd call that a "nip-slip" and cut the scene out of network TV. This was pre-Code Hollywood, obviously, before the bitter repression of the Hays Office took all the fun out of everything and sex had to be implied with a raised eyebrow and a crooked pinkie.

Maybe this was all done on a sound stage, but it looks pretty good to me. Even the music is free-spirited and energetic,  a touch wild, foretelling the delightful Piccolino number at the end of Top Hat (my favorite Fred and Ginger movie: oh, that dress made out of feathers!). There's a sort of vibrating hum in the background suggesting, I suppose, plane engines or - vibrators?

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What's under that skirt?

ACK!  This has to rate as the most hallucinogenic 1930s production number I've ever seen, and I don't even think it's Busby Berkeley. Berkeley had a certain shiny, tappy, violently vulgar quality, while this scene, done in one incredible shot, with its swooping, suffocating curtains, dancers in skin-tight body suits and sweetly androgynous tenor soloist, is oddly sultry, even erotic: those silken drapes are hauled up as seductively as a bosomy chorine slowly raising her hemline to reveal God-knows-what.

That massive spiral-staircase turntable, the design of which must be the product of an evil mind harnessed to an over-the-top budget, keeps revealing ever-more-incredible sights and sounds, bizarre stylized dancers that look almost mechanical, operatic excerpts quickly followed by Rhapsody in Blue, and. . . at the top of it all, a Woman, immobilized as a bride buried up to the waist in cake-frosting.

Yes, she's a human cupcake, folks, looking positively edible, and I could eat her right now.  As the silken folds of those swooshy, almost liquid drapes slowwwwwwwly descend, evoking smoky boudoirs and perfume-reeking bridal chambers, we realize we have been taken on a mind-boggling trip through an abstract-art-deco/Freudian-dream-symbol-scape, a big round succulent spiral slowly sucking us into its insatiable vortex, a. . . Yes. It's eight minutes of glorious, strangely orgasmic movie magic.

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