Gold Diggers of 1933

A Broadway musical made in the middle of the Depression, and its subject is simply having no money: the show being rehearsed shuts down when the producer runs out, and the dancers go looking for work. What holds it up now is Busby Berkeley's choreography. Berkeley arranges the dancers not for a stage but for a camera looking straight down, in geometric patterns; the human body becomes a figure. The opening number, We're in the Money, is sung in costumes covered with coins, and Ginger Rogers performs part of it in pig Latin. Before it ends, bailiffs arrive and carry the set away, so within five minutes the film has cancelled its own cheerfulness. The real sequence is the finale, Remember My Forgotten Man, about soldiers back from the First World War who cannot find work and are standing in bread lines. It is startlingly dark for the closing number of a musical. A genre classic for anyone interested in 1930s Hollywood musicals and Depression-era cinema. Outside the numbers, the story is familiar and thin.