After hearing Polly’s romantic partner, Brad ( Dick Powell), playing the piano across the alleyway, Barney has the music, too. She brings Barney home, where he announces he has the theater set and, with the girls, has the cast, too.
But, instead, Carol is literally so excited about the possibility of work, she’s almost in tears. Initially, the audience will leap to thinking that the rumor was just that. In an interesting reversal, when we cut to her on her end of the phone, she’s choking up. They don’t even have a full set of clothes to dress up in when it’s rumored that producer Barney ( Ned Sparks) will finally get a show off the ground again they have to steal an outfit from Fay ( Rogers) requisitioned from her job at the druggists.Ĭarol is sent in the duds to go see if Barney is on the level, and she calls back to the girls. They’ve all seen the tops of society, but with no show on and no work, Trixie is stealing milk from the window sill of their neighbors. And Trixie is that special kind of woman who is wry and devious in a dangerous mix.
We’re quickly apprised of the personalities. They’re also roommates, and we follow them back to their tenement after a brief insert showing us just how many theaters are are open on Broadway– none. The juxtaposition between the chorus girls singing the virtues of financial security as the show is closed by its creditors isn’t lost as we’re quickly introduced to our droll leads– chorus girls Carol ( Joan Blondell), Polly ( Ruby Keeler) and comic player Trixie ( Aline MacMahon). That leads to another theme of the movie, that audiences could certainly latch on to at the time: hard work getting deferred right when it seems to be paying off. The musical number ends not with a finale, but with a crash as the sheriff department raids the show.
It becomes omnipresent, briefly taking the audience into a completely different type of surreality. At the same time as the Pig Latin verses, we’re treated to an extreme close-up of Rogers’ face, almost rendering it grotesque (I mean, it’s still Ginger Rogers’ face, but still). The first is to take the lyrics and contort them beyond recognition– taking the ode to capitalist wealth and a yearn for decent dignity through materialist riches and making it into childish gibberish, perhaps acknowledging how little that possibly does matter. Besides the discongruity of hearing Ginger Rogers say what sounds like ‘anime’ to modern ears, this serves a purpose. The second verse of the song does something interesting in that it switches up the lyrics with a reprise in Pig Latin. While these lyrics are being belted out with maximum gusto, a bevy of scantily clad chorus girls (with Ginger Rogers in the lead) model their coin-based attire, including a fashion show that give a libertarian fetishist wank material for a year. The movie is weird at times, as weaving this together isn’t easy, but in its plot and execution, it aims for finding a sense of grace about the times, a mixture between hope and the dogged understanding in just how hopeless the whole morass could be.Īs she emerges from the giant phallic Scrooge McDuck vault in an outfit made from cardboard coins, Linda thought, “Gee, I’ve finally made it!” Taking the disparate urges of the era, from the poverty and starvation to the liberated sexual attitudes and sophisticated sense of humor, it manages to balance them to great success. While there are other films that more bleak or sexy or funny, Gold Diggers is the perfect blend of all of these elements. Gold Diggers of 1933 is, I argue, the most complete document of the Great Depression and pre-Code Hollywood. How often on a sunny afternoon are you shaken out of your middle class complacency and thrown full heed into history? Me and the girl sat stunned after the feature ended, if a bit shaken. Watching Gold Diggers of 1933 is a hell of an experience– silence, laughter, and then the occasional “holy shit, look at that!” mixed with “how the hell did they do that?” are all frequent occurrences. Ben Mankiewicz introduced the movie, and while I can’t remember the words or phrases, it certainly enticed.
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