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The Gang's All Here (1943)
Jul. 13th, 2008 08:12 amSo Edward Everett Horton, Eugene Pallette, Benny Goodman, and Carmen Miranda walk into a bar, and Busby Berkeley says, "Is that a banana on your head, or are you just happy to see me?"
I blame Yes, Dear, But Is It Surrealism?: The (Mostly) Cheerful Irrationality of Busby Berkeley’s “The Gang’s All Here.”
Come to think of it, as a piece of propaganda promoting our Good Neighbor Policy during WWII, this one's about as bizarre as North Star from the same year, which features Walter Huston, Dana Andrews, and Anne Baxter as Russian peasants singing happy Russian peasant songs, promoting our new pact with the Soviet Union. Meanwhile in Nazi Germany, Josef von Baky was creating the lush, trippy, melancholy Münchhausen in full Agfacolor to prove that Germany could out-spectacle Hollywood. What a strange year for cinema. (See also Val Lewton's bleak ode to Satanism and suicide, The Seventh Victim, and Universal's Son of Dracula, about a woman who longs to become a vampire.)
I blame Yes, Dear, But Is It Surrealism?: The (Mostly) Cheerful Irrationality of Busby Berkeley’s “The Gang’s All Here.”
Come to think of it, as a piece of propaganda promoting our Good Neighbor Policy during WWII, this one's about as bizarre as North Star from the same year, which features Walter Huston, Dana Andrews, and Anne Baxter as Russian peasants singing happy Russian peasant songs, promoting our new pact with the Soviet Union. Meanwhile in Nazi Germany, Josef von Baky was creating the lush, trippy, melancholy Münchhausen in full Agfacolor to prove that Germany could out-spectacle Hollywood. What a strange year for cinema. (See also Val Lewton's bleak ode to Satanism and suicide, The Seventh Victim, and Universal's Son of Dracula, about a woman who longs to become a vampire.)
