A Film Canon

 

 

If 42nd Street presents the Depression as a way of thinking about the musical, then Gold Diggers Of 1933 presents the musical as a way of thinking about the Depression, reducing the theatrical life to mere pragmatics (pay checks, meal tickets), and replacing the earlier film's craving for the resumption of masculine and feminine duties with a more basic anxiety about survival. This entails a replacement of the director's isolationist stance with the songwriter's collaborative stance, which becomes the main emblem of creative agency, explaining the transference of momentousness from opening night to compositional process. At the same time, LeRoy extends the focus on female solidarity, allocating the women a shared space away from the theatre, and structuring the main romantic exchange around a protracted, strategic act of cuckoldry, with two personifications of bourgeois capital as its victims. This grittiness also alters the character of the musical numbers which, instead of conflating real and fantastic worlds (or cinematic and theatrical space), tend to prioritise one or the other - a decision that gives Busby Berkeley much freer choreographic (and collaborative) rein, particularly evident in "The Shadow Waltz", an exquisitely nuanced geometry of light and darkness incorporating pools, mirrors, helix skirts and neon violins.