Abbasso le donne

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.

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.

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.

Dick Powell and the music of Warren and Dubin is reason enough to watch this otherwise average musical. Busby Berkley's choreography is an aquired taste - I prefer the elegance of Hermes Pan/Fred Astaire and the expert tapping of George Murphy and Eleanor Powell, or even the highly entertaining Bill "Bojangles" Robinson and Shirley Temple duets. But these all came later than DAMES and Berkley's eye-candy style is highly entertaining and, sometimes, memorable.

I never thought Ruby Keeler was terribly talented and her lack of acting ability does show, especially in the company of such accomplished players as Joan Blondell, Powell, Hugh Herbert, and Guy Kibbee. Keeler's acting is passable, if a bit clumsy, and I find her dancing adequate. (She was called, in some 1930s circles, "The Stomper" for her heavy-footed tapping.)

What makes this film a winner is the music. The title song is wonderful and the splendid "I Only Have Eyes For You" is one of the best songs ever written for a movie. That song is fully performed twice, once about midway into the film and, differently, near the end. The later performance is fine, the former one of the screen's greatest musical numbers. Powell sings it with his beautiful high tenor and Berkley provides probably his best ever production. I dare the viewer to not get goose bumps when watching this.

Take away the music and Busby Berkley and you're left with not much except a (mostly) great cast. I give "DAMES" my highest rating for the music and production numbers and a solid middle ranking for the plot. One could do a lot worse than spend 90 minutes with DAMES.

...from Warner Brothers and directors Ray Enright and Busby Berkeley. Ultra-wealthy Ezra Ounce (Hugh Herbert) promises to bequeath $10 million to his relatives Horace (Guy Kibbee), Mathilda (Zasu Pitts), and Barbara (Ruby Keeler), as long as they live a "just and moral life", which includes no show business. Barbara's boyfriend and distant cousin Jimmy (Dick Powell) wants to put on a big musical show, and he teams with brassy showgirl Mabel (Joan Blondell) to make it happen, even if Ezra won't approve.

The story is silly, the characters are one-dimensional, and it takes a long time to get to the musical numbers. The song "I Only Have Eyes for You" has become a true standard, although the dance number here features chorus girls wearing Ruby Keeler masks and it gets kind of disquieting. Blondell has an oddball number singing to men's underwear, while the title number features a smirking Powell espousing the virtues of dames. This wasn't bad, and probably lots of the deficiencies were caused by the production code, which began to be enforced just a month before this film was released.