80- 42nd Street - Director:Lloyd Bacon - Musical Numbers by Busby Berkeley -Cast: Warner Baxter, Bebe Daniels, George Brent, Dick Powell,Ruby Keeler, Guy Kibbee and Ginger Rogers.

"Parallel to the gangster film was the rise of a very different genre--the musical.An interesting coincidence.The harshness of the times...the Depression...colored the most escapist of all film genres.With Busby Berkeley, the genre came into it's own. A former dance instructor, Berkeley was the first to realize that a movie musical was totally different from a staged musical.On film, everything was seen through on eye--The Camera.In designing his production numbers,he would therefor rely on unusual camera movements and angles.The camera itself could partake in the choreography. Berkeley's ballets could not have existed outside of the movies.They were pure cinematic creations.

Berkeley's Films's were viewed as pure entertainment ,but sometimes he applied his wizardry to the grim realities of American life caught in the grip of the Depression. Always stretching the limits of the musical genre,Berkeley even dared choreograph human tragedies.

Berkeley's early musicals at Warner Brothers offered backstage stories whose pacing was not unlike that of the gangster film.They were dominated by figure of the crazed,manic,often embittered Broadway producer.In "Footlight Parade" you had James Cagney.In "42nd Street" Warner Baxter.In these times,if you showed any ambition you either became a Gangster or a showbizz performer...at least in the fantasy world of Warner Brothers.

Broadway offered a metaphor for a desperate,shattered country. Director or chorus girl,your life depended on the show's success.(In 42nd Street) Against all odds,Warner Baxter achieved his dream.But on opening night he was too drained to enjoy the production's thiumph.The show had taken on a life of it's own.The taskmaster's lot ,in the end, was solitude.

-Martin Scorsese-
A Personal Journey With Martin Scorsese Through American Movies

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"Berkeley was a lyricist of eroticism,the high-angle shot,and the moving camera;he made it explicit that when the camera moves it has the thrust of the sexual act with it. ...

It is notable that his Warners films are more dowright suggestive than most of the films made after his move to MGM in 1939."The Gang's All Here" is a surrealist escape,but at Warners he kept a lofty survey over lagoons of water-lily vaginas opening and closing with delirious facility."...

-David Thomson-The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Expanded and Updated

Incredible! Groundbreaker!Incomparable! The Vagina-man Busby Berkeley!!!