Dames

No one who lived through the Great Depression could possibly take seriously negative comments on the quality and content this film written by youngsters with no sense of its historical context. To lament its silliness or find fault with what seem now to be crude mechanical cinematographic devices just begs the question.

This movie could not be recreated in the twenty-first century even in the smallest part. In the first place, musicals are now passé. The drag parody of the title number "Dames" in 1988's film Torch Song Trilogy is proof of that. Moreover, its stock characters (Hugh Herbert, Guy Kibbee, Zasu Pitts) were simply reprising common comedic roles of the day, completely unsuited to the harsher and more cynical models now in vogue. And Ruby Keeler's numbers lack totally the athleticism of our contemporary dancers.

What we can appreciate about the movie is how it fits nicely into the Busby Berkeley oeuvre. After his huge successes of 1933, this example is a fitting continuation to his development as a moviemaker. The catastrophic effects of the Great Depression like mass unemployment, hunger, wholesale uprooting of communities, and abject poverty affecting the lives of millions of ordinary Americans could be forgotten for a few pennies spent in the local movie house. It played to the needs of its time.

Interestingly, the packaging of female pulchritude in the film also fits with that time. What today seems borderline pornographic or insulting to women was accepted without much fuss in 1934. Indeed, any student of Freud could have a field day deconstructing some of the Berkeley images.

As to the music, it is simply classic. Dick Powell's phrasing is a model of tenor sensibility in an age of Big Band baritones. One has to accept that continuity or theatrical presentation is not a factor. Each number stands or falls entirely on its own as seen through the lens of the camera. As an early prototype of the Hollywood musical, Dames was and is a smash hit.

Millionaire Hugh Herbert leads a moral crusade against musical shows he deems objectionable. But his young relatives Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler are both actors and intend to put on a show of their own. They also date but, before you are grossed out, we're told they're 13th cousins. Anyway, the plot is incidental. What we really want to see are those wonderful Busby Berkeley musical numbers, which are all great fun.

Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler are likable leads. Neither strains their acting muscles. Powell sings several pleasant tunes. Joan Blondell, not surprisingly, steals the show as the sexy wisecracking dame she always played so well. Hugh Herbert is an acquired taste. I have watched movies where I enjoyed him and watched movies where I couldn't wait for him to go away. His primary shtick was to fidget with his fingers and mumble a lot, frequently throwing in a 'woo hoo.' It could get old fast. Thankfully here he resists using many of his usual idiosyncrasies (whether that's his choice or the director, I don't know). Because of this, I thought Dames had one of Herbert's better roles. There's more fine comedic support from Guy Kibbee, Zasu Pitts, and Leila Bennett. It's a fun movie. Not the best of the Warner Bros musicals but a good one.

DAMES (Warner Brothers, 1934), directed by Ray Enright, with choreography by Busby Berkeley, is another backstage story with more music than plot. The central character is Ezra Ounce (Hugh Herbert), an eccentric millionaire and founder of the Ounce Foundation of American Morals, who wants to spend his money improving other people's morals. He decides to spend a month at his cousin Mathilda Hemingway's New York home (ZaSu Pitts), to see that she and her husband, Horace (Guy Kibbee) and their daughter, Barbara (Ruby Keeler) have been living clean moral lives. If so, the family then will inherit his $10 million. Aside from not liking women (!), the only other thing Ezra cannot tolerate is show people. It so happens that Barbara is in love with Jimmy Higgens (Dick Powell, in an energetic performance), a playwright/ composer who hopes to find a backer for his show, "Sweet and Hot," and her father, Horace, has encountered Mabel Anderson (Joan Blondell), a stranded showgirl, in his train compartment, leaving her money and his business card with a note written in the back "please do not mention this unfortunate incident to a soul." After Mabel meets up with Jimmy and his troupe, and learns that Barbara is the daughter of the "sugar daddy" Horace, she comes upon an idea of how to get the money from him to back Jimmy's musical show. Yes, by doing some gold digging.

Songs featured in the story: "When You Were a Smile on Your Mother's Lips, and a Twinkle in Your Daddy's Eye" (possibly the longest title for a single song/written by Irving Kahal and Sammy Fain); "I Only Have Eyes For You" (by Harry Warren and Al Dubin) and "Try to See It My Way" (by Mort Dixon and Allie Wrubel). For the Broadway production numbers, all written by Warren and Dubin, and running about 10 minutes each, first comes Joan Blondell dressed in turn of the century clothes performing and singing with other laundry girls to the amusing "The Girl at the Ironing Board" which includes one witty lyric, 'When I'm off on Sundays, I miss all these undies'; followed by "I Only Have Eyes for You" sung by Powell to Keeler, with girls using picture puzzles of Keeler that later fit together to form one gigantic picture of Keeler's face; and "Dames" sung by Powell, performed by a parade of pretty chorines dressed in white blouses and black tights doing their geometric patterns, tap dancing, and Berkeley going crazy with his camera tricks, facial close-ups, leg tunnels, etc. Before the show meets up with a riot started by Ezra's stooges, Blondell comes out center stage in baby clothes singing "Try to See It My Way, Baby" along with other chorines.

I find DAMES acceptable entertainment, although some of the comedy may be trite, with both plot and production numbers starting to repeat themselves. While many critics mention that Ruby Keeler lacks in acting ability, I find her bad acting very noticeable here more than in any of her other movies, past and future, especially when she plays angry and jealous over Powell's attention towards Blondell. This is one of those rare exceptions that I did find her performance annoying than likable. It's interesting to note however that with all the songs, she doesn't get to sing any of them (excluding briefly talking her lyric to "Eyes for You"), and tap dances a minute or two to piano playing to the tune "Dames" during a pre-Broadway tryout. DAMES also marks the fourth and final Powell-Keeler-Berkeley collaboration. In the age of 1930s screwball comedy, Pitts, Kibbee and Herbert fit their character roles perfectly, and all manage to later get drunk after drinking Dr. Silver's Golden Elixer. Also in the cast are Leila Bennett as the bewildered housekeeper, Laura; Johnny Arthur as Billings, Ounce's personal secretary; and songwriter Sammy Fain appearing as songwriter, Buttercup Baumer. One final note, "I Only Have Eyes For You" should have at least been nominated for Academy Award as Best Song of 1934. (***)

One of the nice things about those Warner Brothers Depression musicals is that you can forget some of the sillier aspects of the plot and just enjoy the wonderful nonsense created.

Dames certainly classifies as wonderful nonsense. A wacky millionaire who's a sideline puritan is going to leave a bequest to a cousin and her family providing that they are of good moral character by his ideas. The wacky millionaire is Hugh Herbert and the cousin is Zasu Pitts, her husband Guy Kibbee and her daughter Ruby Keeler. There's another distant cousin Dick Powell who's already out of the will because he's an actor.

Back then theatrical folk were held in some disdain by polite society, though that's hard to believe now. Also some eyebrows might have been raised with Dick's involvement with Ruby. But then again the president of the United States was married to his fifth cousin. I'm sure the brothers Warner knew that full well when Dames was released.

Dames of course is remembered for those wonderful Busby Berkeley numbers and one of the biggest movie songs ever in I Only Have Eyes For You. Introduced by Dick Powell it was never commercially recorded by him though dozens of our best singers have done so. It's a favorite of mine for sure.

Last but not least Dames features the always captivating Joan Blondell who's not above a little blackmail to achieve her ends. A girl's gotta do what a girl's gotta do. She's featured in the Girl at the Ironing Board number, a great piece of Berkeley magic.

We can't forget the title song because as Dick Powell sings, it's what you see the show for. And in that finale they're sure enough of them to satisfy any red blooded male.

Advertised by Warners as Gold Diggers for '34, it's another film in that backstage cycle that traces the efforts of youth restless with creativity to seduce with love cynical hearts hardened by money and rigid morals. It is again a film about the makings of a show, the show we're meant to be watching.

So very much in line with Gold Diggers '33 and Footlight Parade, except a little less wondrous this time, a little less seductive in all the circumstances surrounding the stage, the burlesque of trials and tribulations in fighting to stage a vision.

But it is again Busby Berkeley who is staging the vision that we have come to see. So once more an astonishing panorama of Hollywood dazzle, but with all the frill and gaudiness of the musical working beneath the dazzle to address the circumstances of its making; so we have a number where a woman romances empty shirts on a hangwire but which are animated by invisible strings from above, implying the fates that seem to be in control, another number with the author of the whole thing singing about the face that inspired the vision with the ardor of love, and the final number addressing us from our position as viewers. Of course we have come to be seduced by the dames, nothing else mattered.

The show is so intoxicating that those cynical hearts watching from the balcony are completely soused by the end of it!

So what was from the outset seemingly controlled by the fates, by a woman chancing to sleep on the wrong bed in a train compartment, is gradually revealed to have been shaped all this time around a center with clearly reflected purpose; the author's effort to announce his passion for music and this woman he sings about, and so approach within his art the face behind the cardboard image of social appearances, as the middle number reveals.

As with the other films in this cycle, even if a little less accomplished, it is overall more than potent stuff on the ardor of a loving heart to transform anxieties of a chaotic modern life that we also know into a pattern that seduces love out of both participants and viewers.

It is enjoyable to watch, brisk with dance, the disposition dreamy, but with the small hint of a shadow at the heart of this dream. The choreography maps to the contours of that internal heart wishing to beat truthfully.