Carmen Miranda

(On Cable TV, May 2022) Like many Busby Berkeley musicals, The Gang’s All Here is an otherwise average genre entry made remarkable by a few signature scenes. In this case, Berkeley’s colour debut earns its rave largely through Carmen Miranda performing “The Lady in the Tutti-Frutti Hat” while backed up by dozens of fruit-clad dancers – a visually inventive anthology number (girls waving gigantic bananas!) no matter how you see it. True to form, the film also scores a terrific concluding segment, “The Polka-Dot Polka,” again due to Berkeley’s staging of a large-scale hallucinatory ensemble dancer number. It’s not just in colour: It’s incredibly colourful in its design, and clearly shows how Berkeley could marry new elements to his cinematography. The rest of the film? Fair, but not particularly remarkable. The plot is equal romance, equal musical, and equal wartime propaganda. Benny Goodman and his orchestra show up for a bit part and a few numbers. There’s also a version of “Brazil” that’s good for an earworm or two. Miranda gets a really good showcase here, and Berkeley also scores a good directing coup with a complex one-shot opening sequence taking up from fiction to, well, more fiction. Some contemporary reviews made comparisons with Fantasia (I’d add 2001: A Space Odyssey) and they’re not wrong – even more so than many black-and-white Berkeley productions, The Gang’s All Here gets its best visual impact by pure shapes and movement, with the humans being mere props to a bigger vision. It may not be one of Berkeley’s very best musicals on a sustained basis, but it ranks as a can’t-miss entry in his filmography solely due to its high points.