The Gang's All Here

Something between a fever-dream and a screwball comedy, THE GANG'S ALL HERE is the Fox Musical at its most extravagant. With everthing from Charlotte Greenwood doing her trademarked high-kick routine to Carmen Miranda in a ten-story banana headdress, there's never a dull moment (that might let you concentrate too closely on the plot, which can most charitably be described as serviceable). The picture is a carnival of character bits, ridiculous shtick, and mind-boggling transitions. Edward Everett Horton gets covered with Carmen's lipstick and claims it's ketchup -- "Yes, and from a Brazilian tomato!" ripostes his wife (Greenwood, who really is terrific here). Eugene Pallette growls "Don't be a square from Delaware!" when he wants his pal Horton to get hep and join in the latest dance sensation. A New York nightclub has a stage large enough for what looks like all of a tropical island (for Carmen's immortal "Lady in the Tutti-Frutti Hat" number, truly a Freudian nightmare), and a number set in a Westchester backyard features more trick fountains than two Esther Williams epics.

In the end, it all just stops, with a 30-second plot resolution ("oh, yes, didn't I tell you? He's loved you all along!" or some such) in order to make room for the finale, the most dizzying number yet: a paean to the polka-dot (featuring Alice Faye's most effortful emoting ever on the line "...But the Polka Dot...Lives...On!") that segues into a ballet featuring neon hoops, vast rolling dots, kaleidoscopic trick photography, and, finally, an endearingly primitive blue-curtain effect that shows the heads of all the principals (and hundreds of chorus girls) bouncing along to a reprise of the hit ballad "A Journey to a Star." Well, THE GANG'S ALL HERE may not be quite that, but it's certainly a journey into a different era in filmmaking.

No doubt about it, the movie's a cast of characters collected in someone's goofy heaven—Carmen Miranda, Busby Berkeley, and Edward Everett Horton, all together in one padded cell. Throw in leggy Charlotte Greenwood and froggy Eugene Palette, and there's enough colorful types for ten musicals. Aside from the conventional plot, this 1943 trip to bizzaroland doesn't disappoint for sheer wackiness.

Of course, there's Miranda's infamous arching bananas replete with the recumbent girls, all of which could have sent Dr. Freud into terminal overload. Really, how the carnally obsessed Berkeley managed to stay this side of the censor is still puzzling. And catch that final number with the disembodied heads and Palette croaking out a song. I'm just wondering what Berkeley's dreams were like. They couldn't be any weirder than what's there on the screen.

Then there's the top of Miranda's head sporting more pointy architecture than the Manhattan skyline. And catch her wardrobe—somewhere there's a dozen circus clowns without their costumes. After that, add a few lines of her hilariously fractured English, and she's a whole wonderful show in herself. Too bad her personal life was apparently so unhappy.

Great color photography, along with a soulful Alice Faye. Even the pretty much unknown James Ellison seems a good stand-in for the boys in uniform. No doubt about it, Hollywood knew how to concoct lively and engaging wartime shows. But just as importantly, these concoctions still entertain decades later, even with an inspired lunatic like Busby Berkeley in charge.

It was called "The Girls He Left Behind", when first released in Britain in 1944. In this movie I think Busby Berkeley reached the pinnacle. It was his finest effort. Carmen Miranda, wearing that tutti frutty hat was a mouth-watering revelation; along with her ability to murder the English language. Roly poly Eugene Palette, trying to get the worrisome Edward Everett Horton's mind off his wife. Handing their hats to the hat-check girl, who was the lovely June Haver. (If you blinked you would have missed her). Alice Faye? A dream in Technicolour. James Ellison in the leading romantic role. Where was John Payne? He was the usual romantic lead in these Twentieth Century Fox musical capers of the early nineteen-forties.

Weak plot? Who the hell really cared! The Benny Goodman Orchestra; those songs, and the rich Technicolour, plus the Lanky Charlotte Greenwood, blindly reaching for the telephone and answering with the cat instead, brightened this teen-aged English boy's life in those wartime years of long ago. I have watched it on television more than once. The big question though. Why oh why, has it not been released on video or, better still, DVD? Can anyone explain?

There are films whose plots are much worse. At least this film has funny moments with Charlotte Greenwood and whenever Carmen Miranda is on the screen.

But this film is a showcase for the two sequences choreographed by Busby Berkeley. Much has been written about them, but watching them never ceases to stimulate and amaze my senses. Berkeley's sense of space is so elastic -- you feel as if he could pan and zoom through miles of space and fill it with people, trees, bananas, anything! I don't think any of his Warner Bros. films used the zoom camera with as much daring (supposedly Carmen Miranda almost got knocked off the painted donkey during rehearsals of "The Lady in the Tutti-Frutti Hat").

What is so special for me in these dance sequences is that the images and music are so well-constructed that you loose interest in following the plot and just revel and enjoy the images. People cease being human forms and become elements of color on a painted canvas, and then resume being human once again. It's all incredibly magical and more abstract than Berkeley had been or was able to achieve in the future. Stunning!

I'll get to the plot of "The Gang's All Here" in a minute, because the plot isn't the most memorable part of this movie. The most memorable part is the bananas.

About 20 minutes into the movie, a towering hat of Technicolor fruit appears on the screen, followed by its owner--'40s "Brazilian bombshell" Carmen Miranda. She proceeds to do a number called "The Lady in the Tutti-Frutti Hat," accompanied by chorus girls who bear bananas. Six-foot-tall bananas that continuously droop and sprout until number's end, when the chorus girls, worn out by the burden of this mutated fruit, lay down for a long siesta on a stage dressed up like an island.

There's a reason this number occurs so early on: It takes you the rest of the movie to convince yourself you actually saw this in a 1943 movie.

But then, this is Busby Berkeley, a director who staged his musical numbers as though he was declaring war. And next to kitsch, war is pretty much the motivator here.

The wafer-thin story involves Andy (James Ellison), a soldier who woos and wins Edie (Alice Faye), a canteen dancer, the night before Andy goes off to World War Two. In what seems an instant, Andy gets decorated and returned home to a victory party thrown by the family of Andy's childhood sweetheart and fiancee--who, unfortunately for Edie, is not Edie.

Will the heartbreak be resolved? Do you really care? The plot is mostly an excuse for some snappy repartee between major '40s stars (in particular, Eugene Pallette and Edward Everett Horton are hilarious), and the kind of musical numbers that seem to drop out of thin air. (In a couple of scenes, Benny Goodman and his orchestra stroll by and do some songs just for the heck of it.)

"The Gang's All Here" is really a 1943 time capsule, but an eye-popping rouser of one. They don't make 'em like this anymore. They didn't make 'em much like this back then, either. It's not out on video or DVD, so look for its sporadic broadcasts on cable TV.