Film Chronicle

Sir John Davies's poem "Orchestra, or A Poem of Dancing," published in 1596, pays the definitive Renaissance tribute to Terpsichore. A representative excerpt:

Loe this is Dauncings true nobilitie.Dauncing, the child of Musick and of Love,Dauncing it selfe, both love and harmony,Where all agree, and all in order move;Dauncing, the Art that all Arts doe approve:The faire Caracter of the worlds consent,The heav'ns true figure, and th' earth's ornament.

On the page, Davies's iambic pentameter and ababbcc rhyme scheme—constituting the seven-line rhyme royal stanza invented by Chaucer—create a pattern not unlike the multiplied interweavings, symmetries, movements, and counter-movements timed to a rhythmic pulse which are formed by dancers on a stage or ballroom floor. "Orchestra" describes a harmonious order and simultaneously imitates it, thus giving double pleasure. Meanwhile Davies's claim for dancing as "the Art that all Arts doe approve" seems bold but persuasive, at least in the case of an art the poet was three or four centuries too early to know, the art of the cinema. Throughout its history film has approved the art of dancing by celebrating it onscreen, its exhilaration and orderliness, its commingling of love and harmony.

Of course there are other modes of dancing—extreme, disorderly, possibly violent—and film has paid due attention to them (see, among many other examples, the stylized gang rumbles danced to Leonard Bernstein's music in the film of West Side Story), but in this Chronicle, I will concentrate on the kind of performance which Davies's poem admires. Phrases of his like "th' earth's ornament" and "all in order move" immediately suggest the ornamentally patterned and elaborately synchronized choreography of American musical films from the 1930s and 1940s, above all the choreography of Busby Berkeley.

The son of a silent-film actress, Berkeley began his career as a dance director on Broadway, then in Hollywood came to prominence when he staged the production numbers of Warner Brothers extravaganzas like Roman Scandals, 42^nd Street, Footlight Parade, and the multi-film Gold Diggers series (today it would be called a mega-franchise). All of these are lightly plotted movies, showcases for performance, in which the likes of James Cagney or Dick Powell fall in love with the likes of Ruby Keeler, Joan Blondell, or Ginger Rogers, in the process doing a lot of singing and dancing, sometimes on a reasonable facsimile of a theater stage but more often in production numbers that may begin theatrically but soon depart into the boundary-less and sumptuously lighted space of pure cinema. For sheer flag-waving, synchronized, exuberantly costumed, no-expensespared choreography, Berkeley has never been equaled—at least until the era of televised Olympic opening ceremonies, which in their grand displays of massed forces dancing in unison and forming elaborate symmetrical patterns have become the Berkeley films' only real successors.

Aficionados will have their favorites among Berkeley's dance numbers, say the "42^nd Street" finale in the film of that name; or "By a Waterfall" in Footlight Parade, its chorus girls diving in a human cascade into a pool where they subsequently perform water ballet; or the at first quasi-documentary, then grandly patriotic "Remember My Forgotten Man" at the conclusion of Gold Diggers of 1933. My own favorite would be "Lullaby of Broadway," from Gold Diggers of 1935, a film which Berkeley directed as well as choreographed. Gold Diggers of 1935 offered Depression-era audiences well-dressed swank to admire...