This documentary on the cinema's most inventive choreographer may seem scant at a running time of just under one hour, but it manages to pack in a lot of information, including many marvelous clips of Busby Berkeley's staggeringly complex numbers. Critic J. Hoberman correctly points out that those numbers were less about dancing than about mass posing, and the film astutely connects them to their creator's experience in World War I, when he was stationed in Europe with nothing to do but watch soldiers drilling in formation. Already born more or less in a trunk (his father was a stage director, his mother an actress), Berkeley quickly took his ideas to Broadway in the 1920s and then on to Hollywood, which, with the coming of sound, had discovered the musical. Berkeley liberated the camera from a stationary position in front of the proscenium arch, not only with his famed overhead shots (he wasn't the first to do them, but he was the best) but also with inventive angles and tracking. And a Berkeley routine wasn't always about escapism, as proved by a long excerpt from the "Lullaby of Broadway" number in Gold Diggers of 1935. Berkeley's devotion to his demanding mother, his six marriages, his three trials for vehicular homicide, and his suicide attempt are all here, as is testimony from some of his female performers, including Esther Williams, star of his late career classic, Million Dollar Mermaid. Unlike some Hollywood legends who died unappreciated, Berkeley did live long enough to see his work revived and appreciated, though, as Hollywood chronicler Kenneth Anger points out, his grave stone mentions only his military service, not his immense contributions to the art of film.
by Tom Wiener
review
