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Saturday, July 26, 2008

Does this mean we'll have to start watching Busby Berkeley musicals?
Posted by Jill | 9:32 AM
Actually, I've always had a particular fondness for Busby Berkeley musicals. Busby Berkeley was sort of the Max Fleischer of live action films in that you wonder under what kind of drug-induced haze he came up with this stuff.

"We're In the Money" from Gold Diggers of 1933 may be one of Berkeley's most tasteless numbers:





...but you have to get up early in the morning to beat the pure Bluebeard-esque weirdness of the parade of disembodied Ruby Keeler heads in "I Only Have Eyes For You" from Dames (1934):





But after two more banks failed yesterday, and with the appalling reality that we have a current president who's more like Herbert Hoover than Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and a media bound and determined to do its sworn duty to convince Americans to elect John McCain, it's beginning to look like those of us alive today are going to be able to have the pleasure my parents' generation did of lecturing kids about how "You don't know what hardship is! In the Depression, we......" etc. Of course when you look around you, you'll wonder if we're made of the same kind of stuff and how we'll come out of it.

I also wonder what escapist entertainment of the new Depression will look like, especially in this summer when this:





...is what constitutes a summer afternoon's entertainment.

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6 Comments:
Blogger jurassicpork said...
Hey, I loved The Dark Knight! Lay off my Batman and Heath Ledger.
7/26/08, 10:48 AM  
Blogger D. said...
Mr. Hoover was apparently competent before and after his Presidency. He was, however, in thrall to Republican solutions to economic disasters, which meant that he was squirting at a forest fire with a Super Soaker (/anachronism).

(And yes, I know that Hoover was not the only person with power in this situation, but he blew the "leadership" section of the exam.)

I will be relieved if people can be made to understand that having Republicans in control will not improve the economic crisis.

I hadn't seen Dames in years.
7/26/08, 2:12 PM  
Blogger D. said...
P.S. re Dames: And there was no CGI in those days. All that had to be done in real time and space!

Oh, and thanks for the Flamingos (due to early imprinting, that's the version of "I Only Have Eyes for You" I count as real, for suitable values of "real").
7/26/08, 2:45 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...
I never thought "We're in the Money" was tasteless, but I think you're right. I love Busby Berkeley, but this scene always traumatized me. I couldn't imagine my mother sitting in a theater and watching it without running out weeping.

My parents were depression babies. They never spoke about Busby; Shirley Temple was my mother's idol. What they did talk about was food. The lack of it; how they found it. My father wasn't averse to stealing from fruit stands. When one fruit seller got wise, he'd hit another one. My mother would never think of stealing, but she told many stories about foraging along the Long Island sound, for berries, eels. Until she was an adult, she never ate an orange by herself. She grew up sharing them. They were too dear for five kids to have their own. Friends and relatives avoided her family because of their five children. Nobody wanted to invite them because they'd feel obligated to feed them. Her cousin's in-laws became legendary figures, because they * did * feed them. They were in the scrap metal business and did better than most.

I heard stories about barely keeping a home; in my dad's case, losing his home. His mother had a few payments left, but it was taken anyway. Their triumph came 20 years later when his older brother bought it back.

For them, it was a shameful tragedy to lose a home. Today, people are advised to walk away. Thanks to shady financial “instruments,” homes have become disposable. I think that's what scares me the most, the way assets have become disposable. My father always predicted a depression far worse than the one he lived through, and I always ignored him. I guess the true test of a Hoover-style depression will be the real rate of unemployment. I'm not sure we'll ever approach 25 %, but the underemployment just might kill us.
7/26/08, 4:01 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...
I LOVE the movies from the '30s. I love the costumes and the sets and the story lines tickle me, too.

But I do not want to live in the 30's again.
7/27/08, 12:34 PM  
Blogger Tonio Kruger said...
"We're In the Money" from Gold Diggers of 1933 may be one of Berkeley's most tasteless numbers.
--Jill Cozzi

Actually I always thought it was kinda cute.

And if you view in the context of the original movie, it seems more like ironic social commentary than a celebration of simplistic prosperity.

But I've recently become a fan of Mr. Berkeley's movies, and while the guy is in no danger of being confused with John Steinbeck, he gets away with a lot more in the way of social commentary in his movies than most musicals of the era did.
7/28/08, 9:20 PM  
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