The Busby Berkeley Collection

Intended as escapist fluff for Depression-weary audiences in the 1930s, the elaborate Warner Brothers musicals were eventually acknowledged as genre touchstones, thanks mainly to the imaginative staging of production numbers by choreographer and filmmaker Busby Berkeley. A veteran of the musical stage who migrated to Hollywood with the coming of sound, Berkeley was the first choreographer to fully exploit the visual possibilities offered by film, employing daring cinematic devices to create effects no Broadway audience could ever see, even from orchestra seats. Complex tap routines, outlandish props, stark lighting, kaleidoscopic patterns, and dizzying camera moves set Berkeley's musical extravaganzas apart from any others produced in the early years of talkies. Here, Warner Home Video has collected the very best of these films—42nd Street (1932), Footlight Parade (1933), Gold Diggers of 1933, Dames (1934), and Gold Diggers of 1935—painstakingly restored from original film elements. The backstage plots are pleasantly corny and the casts offer some surprises—erstwhile screen tough guy James Cagney as a nimble-footed hoofer, Titanic grand dame Gloria Stuart as a dewy-eyed ingénue—but those elaborate production numbers remain the real drawing cards. The “Lullaby of Broadway” sequence from Gold Diggers of 1935, for example, still takes one's breath away with its borderline-nightmarish narrative and expressionistic flourishes. DVD extras include new and vintage featurettes, as well as archival cartoons and short subjects, but the real treasure is a 163-minute bonus disc (originally released on laserdisc in 1992) that collects nearly two dozen classic Berkeley musical segments, some from films not yet available on DVD. Highly recommended. Editor's Choice. (E. Hulse)