Film review: Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933 duh)

This is the first film I've actually seen that features Busby Berkeley productions - and I'm a convert!  It also features "We're in the money" as the opening number, featuring Ginger Rogers clad only in giant fake coins hoofing around

and singing a verse in pig Latin (apparently a particular skill of hers that they decided to incorporate).  Slightly confusingly, this song is part of a show that instantly closes (the debt collectors come to repossess everything and try to rip the giant coins off the otherwise-naked chorus girls - there's a lot of that kind of cheerful smut in this definitely pre-code production), so all the other production numbers we see in the film (Pettin' in the Park was a particular highlight, featuring a roller-skating little person pretending to be a decidedly lecherous baby) are part of a different production.  The film itself is the third filmed version of a very popular 1919 Broadway play (that popularized the term "Gold Digger") and also the first in a series of "Gold Diggers of..." films.  This is the only one to feature Ginger Rogers, though, and she's not really the star  She's part of a gaggle of chorus girls, the main three of whom are roommates Joan Blondell

(who I think is my favorite pre-code actress - we saw her in Night Nurse as well) as Carol, Aline MacMahon as Trixie, and Ruby Keeler as Polly.  Polly is part of what seems to be the main couple of the film, as she is sweet on "Brad" who is a song-writer who lives in an apartment opposite their window.  (They are supposed to be penniless, many quips about dodging the landlady, but I must say their apartment looked pretty swanky to me.)  Anyway, pretty soon the show runner whose shows keep getting pulled by his debtors ropes Brad in to write the songs for a new one explicitly about the Depression (most of the songs are pretty upbeat, with the exception of the song "My Forgotten Man"

which rather incongruously ends the film, just when you expect a kind of "all's well that ends well" sort of number).  I say "seems to be" because their place is usurped by the partnership of Carol and Brad's brother.  In fact "Brad" is really the scion of a Boston Banking family who wasn't supposed to get involved with the theater, and whose cover is blown when he has to take over singing on the first night of the show when the male lead succumbs to "lumbago," and his brother comes to New York (along with the portly old family lawyer, whom Trixie sets her greedy eyes on) in order either to disown him or to drag him back to Boston sans attachments.  But the brother mistakes Carol for Polly and Trixie and Carol decide to play an extended trick on the brother and the lawyer.  (If you think that the second delivery boy delivering hats in the sequence when these four first meet sounds like Winnie The Pooh, it's because he's Sterling Holloway.) Shenanigans ensue, with (of course) Carol and the brother (and Trixie and the Lawyer) falling for each other.  It's great fun and the musical numbers are indeed amazing (gigantic sets!  A roller-skating baby!  Undressing in silhouette! A can-opener applied to metal underclothes!  Glow-in-the-dark violins!)

but perhaps what's most noticeable, as with a lot of pre-code films, is the autonomy and unashamed sexuality of the liberated female leads.  This is a film that passes the Bechdel Test with flying colors.