IronWatcher’s review published on Letterboxd:
Watched on m.ok.ru/video/297124104952
It is the name of Busby Berkeley, undoubtedly synonymous with the best Hollywood musicals of the 30s and 40s and a precedent of the school that was later continued by Gene Kelly, Vincente Minelli and Stanley Donen. "Gold Diggers of 1933" is the choreographer's first collaboration in this musical series, created by the Warner Brothers production company in 1923, which tells stories of gay girls, vampires and Broadway singers. For Berkeley, who was brought to Hollywood by the MGM production company, 1933 was the year of his consecration, when he made the extraordinary films "42nd Street" and "Footlight Parade" by Lloyd Bacon and "Gold Diggers of 1933" by Mervyn Le Roy, summing up his three years of experience in the American film industry that had begun with Eddy Cantor. Set in a period close to the Great Depression of 1929, the films deal with the social conflicts involved or the subsequent period of recovery, focusing on the world of the musical and its protagonists.
"Gold Diggers of 1933" tells the story of Brad, a young man from the Boston aristocracy who dreams of becoming a composer and musical performer on Broadway. He lives in hiding and under a false name in a boarding house where he has as neighbors three young dancers who are desperate because of the shortage of work due to the crisis. All the theaters have closed, but the proposal of musical producer Barney Hopkins gives hope to Carol, Trixie and Polly, who is in love with Brad. When Brad's whereabouts are discovered due to a very successful musical performance, his family is firmly against his intentions and sends his brother J. Lawrence and the family lawyer, Fanuel H. Peabody, to stop him by any means necessary.
The film, directed by Mervyn Le Roy, features the biggest stars of the time. It stars Dick Powell, a singer with a pleasant, honeyed voice who starred in the later sequels "Gold Diggers of 1935" and "Gold Diggers of 1937"; the brooding, charismatic Ruby Keeler; and, a year later, his wife Joan Blondell, an actress with a stellar career and a face of peculiar beauty. Warren William as Brad's brother, Guy Kibbee as a lawyer and Ned Sparks as Barney, a music producer very similar to the one in "42nd Street". We also see a very young Ginger Rogers, who opens the musical number with which the film begins, although her role is secondary since, although she had done more than a dozen titles, she had not yet achieved real fame.
The musical is dominated by three musical numbers that are part of the leitmotif, as in the sequels, and almost all of them take place towards the end. The highlights of this film are "We're in the Money", sung by Ginger Rogers, "The Shadow Waltz", sung by Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler, and "My Forgotten Men", sung by Joan Blondell and Etta Motten, the latter a bitter and melancholy tribute to the soldiers of World War I, a masterpiece of deep thought and great aesthetic and creative quality. As with some Berkeley musicals, this is not a pure musical; the content touches tangentially on pressing issues of the society in which it is set: the crisis of 1929 and its aftermath, social prejudice, the question of World War I soldiers, and others. The musical numbers are among the most representative of the Berkeley style and include great achievements that revolutionized the visuality of the musical, such as the inclusion of complex geometric formations, the play on perspective and the repetition of motifs in dresses, pianos or coins, the break with the frame of the stage, the variety of camera angles, the revolving stages, the troupes of joyful dancers, the use of fluorescent tubes on the violins and the combination of shots that build the choreography through montage.
"Gold Diggers of 1933" is one of the most valuable works in Berkeley's series of collaborations on the subject, perhaps because it was his first. It was the third most successful film at the American box office in 1933, grossing over three million dollars in the United States and abroad on a budget of $433,000. In 2003, it was selected by the Library of Congress as a "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant" work for inclusion in the U.S. National Film Registry.
