(1933)

Starring Joan Blondell, Dick Powell, Aline MacMahon, Ruby Keeler, Ginger Rogers; dir: Mervyn Le Roy (choreography: Busby Berkely)

You gotta remember the Busby Berkeley spectaculars are still films, and Gold Diggers Of 1933 is primarily an entertainingly dry comedy in the 1930s Hollywood tradition. This despite it being best remembered for its ‘gritty’ Depression-oriented finale My Forgotten Man, paying tribute to the homeless ex-WWI soldiers whom the system couldn't accomodate (known colloquially then as 'the forgotten men') through a musical mini-noir of tenement tragedy and suicide - set to song! (This number’s climax of turbine-like wheels of soldiers counter-rotating retains a Fritz Lang-like industrial dimension, even now.) 

But this first in the Gold Diggers series is a Busby Berkeley film.   It being just ahead of 1934's start to the Hays Code censorship, 21st Century audiences still gasp (in delight!) at the barely-there flimsies adorning the chorines of Pettin’ in the Park, even before convenient ‘rain’ causes them to disrobe in silhouette. Oh, what a world!