The Gang's All Here

365 Films

Entry #111

The Gang’s All Here (1943)

Directed by Busby Berkeley

The first time I became aware of the miraculous existence of filmmaker Busby Berkeley was during a throwaway gag involving a parody of his musical numbers in Gremlins 2.  Upon viewing more and more elaborate parodies of his work, I began to get curious, but sadly never got around to catching up with his work until recently.  It was last summer when New York’s Film Forum hosted a newly restored version of his epic 1943 musical, The Gang’s All Here when I became clued into his brilliance.  Not to suggest that I actually got to see it at Film Forum, but reading all the rapturous praise and imagining the gorgeously trippy musical numbers was enough to satisfy my appetite.  Luckily for me, the Cinefamily here in Los Angeles hosted a run of the restored late last year and I got to see it in all of its splendid 35mm glory.  I bring this up because this is truly a film that needs to be seen in a theater, or at least on the top of a very tall mountain, either way it’s gotta be big.  The thing about Busby Berkeley musicals is that their primary function is practically identical to your typical action picture.  The movie itself is merely a conduit through which, a filmmaker may flex his or her visual prowess through a stunning series of action sequences/musical numbers.  Even viewing these types of films follows the same relative practice wherein one ticks the minutes away until the next big set piece.  That’s not to say that the non-musical numbers in Gang are boring or staged in a pedestrian fashion (by contrast, I would say those sequences actually elevate Gang definitively above Berkeley’s earlier work on pictures where he served solely as a choreographer).  At the same time, what sets this film apart and where it truly blasts out of the stratosphere are those very same musical numbers.  Unfortunately, modern Hollywood has been Rob Marshall’d into an incredibly disenchanting corner.  From the Academy Award winning success of Chicago and the financial windfall of the Step-Up franchise, today’s filmmakers seem to be on a mission to rob the musical genre of every trace of visual ambition.  In the case of Chicago, the trend is to take a popular stage show and present it in the most dull and literal way possible (see also last year’s Les Mis, actually don’t).  The Step Up variety of musical involves chopping the shit out of the images until becomes more about the idea of human movement rather than the actual practice of it.  Last year’s Rock of Ages was an unholy mixture of these two techniques and thankfully, American moviegoers looked the beast square in the eye and said, nein!  The point of all this is to suggest that The Gang’s All Here damn near changed my life and certainly changed the way I looked at what a spectacular Hollywood musical is capable of.  The sequences Berkeley concocts in this film are like nothing you’ve ever seen before.  Eye popping doesn’t even begin to describe it.  If I were to tell you that there is a routine in this film that could Tron accountable for an accusation of plagiarism, you’d drop everything you’re doing right now and go watch, right?  Sure there are scores of other classic musicals that may reach a different kind of perfection, but I can’t think of one that matches the visual ingenuity, the mind boggling ambition, and the levels sheer psychedelic bug-fuckery that is The Gang’s All Here.