BABES ON BROADWAY

(1941, Busby Berkeley) Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland decide to “put on a show,” en route to that Broadway break, with Vincente Minnelli staging the duo’s deserted vaudeville theater specialties. Berkeley’s minstrel show finale (in blackface) called for a shot with 38 camera moves. 35mm. Approx. 118 mins.
4:25, 8:45

“Garland and Rooney dancing together are a happy sight.”
– Pauline Kael

“Pretty darn good! Berkeley applies some dazzling crane work to the production numbers.”
– Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader

FOR ME AND MY GAL

(1942, Busby Berkeley) WWI draft notice?! Just when vaudevillians Gene Kelly (in his debut) and Judy Garland are about to hit the big time… but maybe an injury? Based on a true story – and using the real names – with a restrained Berkeley recreating the acts as they would actually have been performed. 35mm print courtesy Harvard Film Archive. Approx. 100 mins.
6:45

“Kelly is amazingly fresh; his grin could melt stone, and he and Garland are a magical pair…”
– Pauline Kael

“Busby Berkeley, justly famous for his spectacularly choreographed and ingeniously photographed musical production numbers, rose to a very specific occasion—the Second World War—to become, much to anyone’s surprise, one of the great artists of the particularly hectic wartime spirit. This occurred in two films, the first of which [is] For Me and My Gal…among the most advanced of wartime art, which was both modernist and abstract; for instance, bebop and Abstract Expressionism were forged on the home front in the early nineteen-forties. […] He had, in earlier films of lesser dramatic import, tuned his exquisite cinematographic style to the performances of his actors. Now, with For Me and My Gal, he acquired both a tone and a theme that expanded that dramatic vision into a world view of historic scope.”
– Richard Brody, The New Yorker

“A JOYOUS REMINDER OF VAUDEVILLE'S ROMANTIC AGE!”
– The New York Times