Watch Gold Diggers of 1935 For Free

Such a frustrating disappointment

Don't listen to the negative reviews

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

. . . to rivet America's attention on how worthless the country's Richest One Per Cent are to the rest of us. While rival outfits such as MGM tried to fill American minds with fantasies such as the WIZARD OF OZ and GONE WITH THE WIND, Warner kept crashing to the forefront of the Public's consciousness with their gritty exposes, such as director William A. Wellman's HEROES FOR SALE or choreographer/director Busby Berkeley's numerous extravaganzas, including GOLD DIGGERS OF 1935. Though Warner was infamously frugal (this flick is filmed in black and white, after all), Busby was an expert on making a C-note look like a million bucks on-screen. GD35 culminates with one of those phony baloney "charity" functions, in which the One Per Cent make sure that 99% of the money "raised" is frittered away on pointless excess for their own wicked amusement. This show-within-the-movie (for a "Milk Fund") begins with what appear to be 88 white-gowned female concert pianists plunking away at 88 Steinway grand pianos frivolously ruined with milk-white paint jobs. Act Two shows former WWI drill Sgt. Berkeley's true stripes. Flypaper heiress Ann Prentiss at first is in a milky-white garbed audience of two, watching 198 frenetic tap dancers sweating for her pleasure on a cavernous stage. But then Berkeley concludes this piece by having normal people shove One Per Center Ann out of a high-rise window! Warner is doing all it can short of spelling out on the screen "Rise up, you pawns!" to keep America a free country (as opposed to the MGM-style Bread & Circus Show it is today).

I consider this a failure, mostly because I had been so imaginatively tickled by the wonderful earlier films in the same cycle of Warners musicals.In the earlier Gold Diggers from '33 and Footlight Parade, song and dance were only the voluptuous expression of a hardened heart learning to beat truthfully. The wrap-around into narrative was about the circumstances drawn from the depressions of actual life seducing inspiration out of both participants and viewers. Their gaudiness was eloquent, revealing a heart that was rich in many ways.This is the debut proper of the man who was responsible for staging the visions in those films, the actual films being about this man staging the visions. Both those were about Busby Berkeley making films.Not to imply that the man's talents had reached a certain meridian, because we find here one of the most astonishing set pieces he concocted; pure Hollywood dreaming about a woman dreaming a Hollywood that eventually plunges her to a neon doom. Film history has noted this piece as avant-garde, and has grouped it together with other early attempts at an American surrealism.But having assumed here the reigns of the entire production and not just the dance numbers, Berkeley exemplifies the expressive limitations both the surrogate filmmakers inside those films and the actual filmmakers responsible for them were called to solve; how to integrate his pure images within the environment that gives rise to them? What the actual filmmakers did, Mervyn Leroy in Gold Diggers '33 and Lloyd Bacon in Footlight, was of course to structure their films around the efforts of an impulsive artist learning to frame that intuition that so generously gave him images.Here the man is left at his own devices, with just that intuition to guide him. The result? Dazzling spectacle when the show demands it, but babbling nonsense everything around it. There is no mirror to hold the images, no reflection that reveals soul. Just a weak attempt at a farce of errors, coupled with shenanigans about marriage and money.Oh, it is again about the staging of a show, presumably the one we are meant to be watching. Various people scheme one way or another. But no one is wiser for seeing it.

Shot in crisp B&W with some lavishly designed sets and brilliant lighting techniques, the musical numbers in this film shine because of the sheer genius of Busby Berkeley's fantastic routines.The story is thin and silly, but from start to finish it's an entertaining show with Dick Powell and Gloria Stuart in the romantic leads supported by such stalwarts among character actors as Alice Brady, Frank McHugh, Hugh Herbert and Adolphe Menjou. Dorothy Dare and Wini Shaw are added delights.It's the typical boy meets girl story with Powell assigned to be a protective escort (as a business proposition posed by wealthy Alice Brady) whose daughter wants some excitement in her life before promising to marry stuffy Hugh Herbert.But once the songs start spinning and the clever camera work gets going, the viewer will appreciate all the effort that went into this undertaking. Especially striking is the final musical sequence built around "Lullaby of Broadway," first the segment with the white pianos and then the actual dance routine choreographed brilliantly by both Busby and the Warner cameras.Striking talent on display here, worth a peek if you're a fan of the old Warner Brothers musicals. Alice Brady is a riot as the world's stingiest wealthy woman always devising ways to do things on the cheap.

Two words: Busby Berkeley (BB). If you know anything about movies or dancing (or even direction) you've heard the name and this movie (& others like it) is the reason why. BB's genius is that he "got it.". He understood that film was capable of so much more than being a newsreel or just capturing what you can see on a stage. It's more than an amusement but can be used to actually stimulate surrealistic thought. What Picasso did with color BB did with a palette of black, white & gray. Not only stimulating and simulating surreal dreams, but giving them an uneasy feeling, keeping the dark, sharp edge on the lust others only sought to elicit but never examine. As if to say "Images direct thought & these are the thoughts you're leaning towards...Is this the way for you?", Rod Serling's "sign post up ahead" years out of time. There is (strangely) humor, some rather awful singing, and some other fluff around the Berkeley numbers. But they serve only as a frame. BB's work hits you in the eye & travels to your brain as it has for millions to mimic & mock since then. And it alone makes this movie worth watching.