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The Gang's All Here



The iconic director-choreographer Busby Berkeley's first full-length film in Technicolor is well established as being perhaps the most visually stunning spectacle of any Hollywood musical. But to focus on this risks overlooking its exuberant performances, gleeful humour, sensational music and glowing romance, amidst countless other pleasures.

A young soldier's fast-struck love affair with a New York City nightclub singer, despite his long-standing betrothal to a wealthy childhood friend, provides the catalyst for this dizzying parade of home-front melodrama, comic set-pieces and mind-boggling musical numbers (including 'The Lady in the Tutti-Frutti Hat' and 'The Polka-Dot Polka').

Featuring some of the most popular musical stars of its day, including Alice Faye, the incomparable Carmen Miranda, and the legendary Benny Goodman, along with brilliantly funny supporting turns from Edward Everett Horton, Eugene Pallette, and Charlotte Greenwood, The Gang's All Here is an outlandishly surprising classic from one of the Hollywood dream factory's most influential innovators. The Masters of Cinema Series is proud to present a world premiere of a stunning new restoration on Blu-ray.

BLU-RAY ONLY EDITION

• New high-definition 1080p presentation
• English subtitles for the deaf and hearing-impaired
• New & exclusive full-length audio commentary with critics Glenn Kenny and Farran Smith Nehme and film historian Ed Hulse
• The documentary Busby Berkeley: A Journey with a Star
• A deleted scene from the film
• Trailer
• A 36-PAGE BOOKLET featuring essays on the film by critics David Cairns and Karina Longworth, and more!

An interesting release, if not scintillating. Nice supplements. This does represent a very important part of the golden age of hollywood, especially during the war years.

I adore Nehme's writing; it's terribly clever and infectious. I cannot wait to see what she does with her parts of the commentary.

Looks like they replaced the Drew Casper commentary from the Fox DVD. I assume that's not a big loss

manicsounds wrote:Looks like they replaced the Drew Casper commentary from the Fox DVD. I assume that's not a big loss

MOC has (rightly) come out against Casper's "contributions" in the past, so no big surprise-- though this release is! \:D/

A strange and wondrous creature, this. Some of my favorite dissolves in cinema, amongst many other zany delights.

Never heard of it, not a big musical guy. But glad they're releasing something unexpected, and hope it looks gorgeous in technicolor!

The musical numbers are wild and over-the-top and have giant bananas and all, but I don't think they come anywhere near the level of artistry and creativity seen the in the films Berkeley choreographed around 1933-34. But those may never see the light of day on Blu-ray thanks to Warner, so I can certainly understand why MoC would want to release this one.

How does this compare with Warner's box set? More like Gold Diggers of 33 or Footlight or more like Varsity Show

Warner did two box sets. I've just given my opinion on how this one compares to the early work, but to elaborate a bit.
The Gang's All Here was a return to form for Berkeley but I don't think it matches the heights of Footlight Parade, Gold Diggers of 1933, Gold Diggers of 1935, etc. After Gold Diggers of 1935 Warner had slashed a lot of his budgets and he didn't enjoy the same kind of creative freedom. So when he went to Fox for this picture, he was able to go all out again.
But I find the best choreographed sequences in the prewar films to be moments of seriously impressive staging and filmmaking within otherwise often frivolous fun films (not that there's anything wrong with that). The Gang's All Here replaces most of the more abstract use of shapes, geometry and movement in those earlier works with choreography that is still impressive but doesn't teach the formal heights of the earlier stuff with a much campier kind of thing (I mean, it's Carmen Miranda providing most of the laughs here after all), with outright phallic symbolism and reveling in the over-the-top musical production in a more conventional way than in his best work.

Richard Brody's take on the film is a good one, I think. Also has some clips.

I've just read David Cairns' booklet essay, which very wisely doesn't attempt to excuse the film's glaring deficiencies:

The year is 1943. Many Hollywood stars have enlisted, making them naturally unavailable for acting duties. That fact can’t excuse or explain James Ellison in a leading man role, but I offer it in mitigation. Really, he’s the least of the film’s troubles. There’s no way to account for a film whose “story” is credited to three people, with a fourth as screenwriter, yet lacks any sense of deliberate construction, dramatic tension, or even basic causation. It’s not a work of fiction, it’s a jamboree, and consumed as such it offers rarified pleasures and peculiarities unavailable outside the personal universe of Mr. Berkeley.

This seems to me to hit exactly the right note. And he then goes on to enthuse in considerable detail about the films undoubted virtues, with asides like:

(Berkeley's long and complex camera moves show a kind of technical bravura that seems to have been actively discouraged outside the musical genre: Orson Welles had lengthy crane shots snipped into fragments by studio editors on both The Magnificent Ambersons [1942] and The Lady from Shanghai [1946]. But add singing, and the most flamboyantly self-conscious, sinuous moves were not only accepted, but practically required.)

And, later on:

But then things, as they tend to do in a Berkeley extravaganza, go batshit insane.

It does seem strange that most modern heavily edited musicals have forgotten the need for long takes and flowing shots to add a sense of rhythm and flow to an unbroken performance. That doesn't mean that films have to be kept 'stagey' and anti-cinematic - Berkeley is one of the cinema's prime visal stylists who dances with the camera as much, if not more than, the actors - but it does allow for developing, entire sequences of uninterrupted flowing movement, which would seem to be extremely important factor for a musical film in particular.

David Cairns' Shadowplay blog has also covered The Gang's All Here in a few posts - particularly the "floating heads of death" final sequence - here (with some interesting comments by David Ehrenstein) and here.

As the comments in that second link mention, the same year James Ellison is also the top billed lead of I Walked With A Zombie over Frances Dee (who is playing the character who is driving the narrative) and Tom Conway (just hitting his stride in the Falcon films), so obviously someone felt that Ellison was a major headlining star name! Or perhaps he just had a great agent to do his negotiating!

I am thinking back to Looney Tunes episodes now with characters who would be donning bananas...is it a reference to the character in this film?

Drucker wrote:I am thinking back to Looney Tunes episodes now with characters who would be donning bananas...is it a reference to the character in this film?

Those were caricatures of and references to Carmen Miranda.

Drucker wrote:I am thinking back to Looney Tunes episodes now with characters who would be donning bananas...is it a reference to the character in this film?

Like this one.

Exactly.

If you have any disc of this and haven't watched the deleted scene, I highly recommend you do so for the laugh out loud hilarious physical comedy of Eugene Palette physically imitating

Spoiler

Veronica Lake! Not to mention Edward Everett Horton performing a striptease as Gypsy Rose Lee