GOLD DIGGERS OF 1935

(1935, Busby Berkeley) At Lake Waxapahachie, it’s time for filthy rich Alice Brady to get desk clerk/med student Dick Powell to escort daughter Gloria (Titanic) Stuart safely, plus put on that summer show – highlighted by Berkeley’s 56 neon-lit pianos and the Oscar-winning (Best Song) tap extravaganza “Lullaby of Broadway.” 35mm. Approx. 95 mins.
12:30, 4:15, 8:00

“Busby Berkeley, the master of scenic prestidigitation, continues to dazzle the eye and stun the imagination…His crowning contribution, and quite the most breathtaking feature of Gold Diggers of 1935, is the kaleidoscopic pageant which he has invented for the ‘Lullaby of Broadway’ number. An impressionistic glimpse into the life of a Broadway lady of leisure, it is a striking blend of music, choreography and highly skilled camera work, and it reveals Mr. Berkeley in one of his happiest moods.”
– Andre Sennwald, The New York Times

“‘The Lullaby of Broadway’ is one of his most inventive choreographies: a mini-chronicle of a day in the life of the Great White Way, ending with the night bringing on an exhilarating horde of tap dancers.”
– Tom Milne, Time Out (London)

“Features one of Berkeley’s most celebrated sequences, “Lullaby of Broadway,” a bitter vision of the life and death of a New York party girl. The routine’s central set piece starts with a couple who sweep and twirl through an impossibly vast, multitiered, stark white Art Deco ballroom that Berkeley covers in expressively disorienting angles, leading to a hectic stomping dance-off between opposing phalanxes of male and female dancers.”
– Richard Brody, The New Yorker 

WONDER BAR

(1934, Lloyd Bacon) Al Jolson, Kay Francis, Dick Powell, Dolores del Río, Ricardo Cortez, et al. – you’ll need a relationship scorecard to keep up with this ménage à l’infini, set in a bustling Paris nightclub. A blackface extravaganza lowlights the sumptuous Berkeley numbers. Digital. Approx. 90 mins.
2:25, 6:10, 9:55

“The film combines 20th century elements (Art Deco styling, jazz and tango music, liberated sexual mores, and a non-moralizing narrative resolution) with modes of popular entertainment more associated with the 19th century (vaudeville, Yiddish “tummler” tradition, waltz music, and black-face performance). Wonder Bar is both modern, even socially progressive, in ways that provide a frisson of pleasure for its audacity.”
– David Boxwell, Senses of Cinema