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The Busby Berkeley Book
. 1973, with light shelfwear to dustjacket, contents clean & bright, no markings, Professional booksellers since 1981
- GenresNonfictionMedia Tie In
1000 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1973
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
June 14, 2016
For good or for ill, and to my credit or to my embarrassment, this image is from my favorite moment in film history.
Director-choreographer Busby Berkeley, in the final act of the gaudiest, kitschiest and cheesiest of the World War II-era Technicolor musicals, 1943's The Gang's All Here (yes, that one, the one with Carmen Miranda and the giant phallic bananas), completely shatters the conventions of musical choreographic representation, refining it to a pure geometric abstraction -- a human kaleidoscope, a druggy amorphous prism of motion, color and sound. It was, to say the least, something highly unusual for Hollywood in that era, and I find it ecstatic.
The movie is terrible. The acting is bad, the script atrocious, the humor forced, the romance stilted, the musical numbers laughable. And, yet, somehow, it's Busby Berkeley's masterpiece, the pinnacle of his warped vision. It's also one of my favorite movies of all time. Like all guilty pleasures, it inhabits that recognizable place where the silly meets the sublime.
You know Berkeley, even if you don't know his name or films. When you see those overhead camera shots of chorus girls arrayed in geometric patterns, that's Berkeley. When the camera dollies and swoops past Carmen Miranda into a melee of giant bananas held aloft by dancing girls in a faux, kitschy Latin surrealist fantasy world, that's Berkeley. When you see a soundstage full of white pianos and tap dancers and a woman jumping to her death as Manhattanites toast champagne glasses in deco splendor to the sounds of "Lullaby of Broadway," that's Berkeley.
Discussions of camp (and the various subtexts therein) in the movies in intellectual scholarly circles in the '60s and '70s, brought some degree of respectability to Berkeley's work, and this discussion was fortuitous to have happened at the moment when psychedelic drug use was emergent, so films like this were shrewdly marketed to the young as sensory trips.
I have two DVD box sets of Berkeley's primary film output, which years ago would have seemed a notion out of science fiction. I'm old enough to remember renting film projectors and filling up my car trunk with massive and heavy 16-millimeter cans of film from the public library just to be able to watch rare films. This was before VHS, even.
In that kind of world -- when movies were not readily and compactly available and electronically streamable as now -- the oversized coffee table book became almost a surrogate necessity for film buffs.
The 1970s were a particular golden age for these kinds of books, reproducing movie stills in lieu of actually being able to see these elusive films. When I was young, classics or even common movies might not show up -- either on TV or at movie houses -- for years. When they showed up, you had to be paying attention and then take your one shot.
This 1973 book was a fondly remembered example of the coffee-table movie book genre. It features a dedication by Berkeley himself, and a foreword by his famous Warner Bros. dancing starlet, Ruby Keeler.
This book surveys each film he made, one by one (surprisingly, he made far more films than I was aware of), with beautifully reproduced stills, production credits and well-wrought summaries that include plot, behind-the-scenes production history, rundowns and descriptions of the musical numbers and critiques of the film at hand. It also includes ample biographical detail of the choreographer's life, including the infamous 1935 car wreck in which he was acquitted of manslaughter and his many marriages. The book is obviously "pro-Berkeley," so if you want balance you have to go elsewhere.
With all the films now easily available, and all the information you'd want about them and Berkeley on the internet, this book is a bit outmoded. But it served its purpose in a simpler time that I feel privileged to have lived in.
(KevinR@Ky 2016)
Director-choreographer Busby Berkeley, in the final act of the gaudiest, kitschiest and cheesiest of the World War II-era Technicolor musicals, 1943's The Gang's All Here (yes, that one, the one with Carmen Miranda and the giant phallic bananas), completely shatters the conventions of musical choreographic representation, refining it to a pure geometric abstraction -- a human kaleidoscope, a druggy amorphous prism of motion, color and sound. It was, to say the least, something highly unusual for Hollywood in that era, and I find it ecstatic.
The movie is terrible. The acting is bad, the script atrocious, the humor forced, the romance stilted, the musical numbers laughable. And, yet, somehow, it's Busby Berkeley's masterpiece, the pinnacle of his warped vision. It's also one of my favorite movies of all time. Like all guilty pleasures, it inhabits that recognizable place where the silly meets the sublime.
You know Berkeley, even if you don't know his name or films. When you see those overhead camera shots of chorus girls arrayed in geometric patterns, that's Berkeley. When the camera dollies and swoops past Carmen Miranda into a melee of giant bananas held aloft by dancing girls in a faux, kitschy Latin surrealist fantasy world, that's Berkeley. When you see a soundstage full of white pianos and tap dancers and a woman jumping to her death as Manhattanites toast champagne glasses in deco splendor to the sounds of "Lullaby of Broadway," that's Berkeley.
Discussions of camp (and the various subtexts therein) in the movies in intellectual scholarly circles in the '60s and '70s, brought some degree of respectability to Berkeley's work, and this discussion was fortuitous to have happened at the moment when psychedelic drug use was emergent, so films like this were shrewdly marketed to the young as sensory trips.
I have two DVD box sets of Berkeley's primary film output, which years ago would have seemed a notion out of science fiction. I'm old enough to remember renting film projectors and filling up my car trunk with massive and heavy 16-millimeter cans of film from the public library just to be able to watch rare films. This was before VHS, even.
In that kind of world -- when movies were not readily and compactly available and electronically streamable as now -- the oversized coffee table book became almost a surrogate necessity for film buffs.
The 1970s were a particular golden age for these kinds of books, reproducing movie stills in lieu of actually being able to see these elusive films. When I was young, classics or even common movies might not show up -- either on TV or at movie houses -- for years. When they showed up, you had to be paying attention and then take your one shot.
This 1973 book was a fondly remembered example of the coffee-table movie book genre. It features a dedication by Berkeley himself, and a foreword by his famous Warner Bros. dancing starlet, Ruby Keeler.
This book surveys each film he made, one by one (surprisingly, he made far more films than I was aware of), with beautifully reproduced stills, production credits and well-wrought summaries that include plot, behind-the-scenes production history, rundowns and descriptions of the musical numbers and critiques of the film at hand. It also includes ample biographical detail of the choreographer's life, including the infamous 1935 car wreck in which he was acquitted of manslaughter and his many marriages. The book is obviously "pro-Berkeley," so if you want balance you have to go elsewhere.
With all the films now easily available, and all the information you'd want about them and Berkeley on the internet, this book is a bit outmoded. But it served its purpose in a simpler time that I feel privileged to have lived in.
(KevinR@Ky 2016)
September 12, 2017
A thorough if somewhat standard look at the master' films. Notable for its stellar number of photographs.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews