Again, I make no journal entry – I don’t know why, nor what I’m looking for – M.F.
“Gold Diggers of 1933” is billed as a musical, with song and dance numbers, light comedy and one of those easy plots in which, after all the conflicts are resolved, everyone wins, but in the end, the only thing we are left with is the horror. Like Conrad’s Marlow’s Kurtz in “Heart of Darkness” – know what I mean?
I don’t know what that other guy in the last piece was talking about [see “The Seven Scariest Movies – Ever” immediately prior to this piece in The Checkout – Ed.], whoever he was (maybe he was some kind of mashiah), but “Gold Diggers of 1933” is terrifying in a way that only reality can be terrifying, trumping the contrived.
In the movie, the reality is given to us as part of a stage show in the form of “Remember My Forgotten Man”, a nearly seven-minute-long streetwalker torch song which is itself an artistic contrivance, an illusion, an emotional manipulation. But that is the purpose of art – to help us get at the truth, at the essence, of our existence in a way we can never get from our existence itself.
Since “Gold Diggers of 1933”, no one has made, or could make, a movie like it again. With predecessors and followers, it remains a landmark achievement in raw and fantastical moviemaking – a one of a kind.
Made in the midst of The Great Depression, a result of the Wall Street financial crash of 1929, “Gold Diggers of 1933” provides immediate bitter and painful commentary upon its own times.
The Great Depression is at the center of the movie and is the source of opposing tensions that ultimately resolve with poverty, defeat, desolation, and destitution overwhelming and overawing the charming comic plot of the main, or real, story, snapping its lighthearted thread and suddenly turning it into a subplot or inconsequential secondary story.
On the other hand, the stage show in the movie, the grand illusion, moves forward with inexorable force to become, in all its grimness and anguish, the main line.
The real story dissolves within the unreal story, switching places with it; the happy ending dissolves inside the sad ending and the sad ending wins, becoming real. And in fact, the stage show within the movie is real, as outside the movie theater of 1933 looms The Great Depression.
At the beginning of the film, there is a show about money that doesn’t go on, while at the end of the film, there is one about poverty that does.
To wit, the movie opens with the stage number, “We’re in the Money” – a huge undulating chorus of glamorous dancing, singing chicks barely clad in coin facsimile bikinis and donning large coin props on their hands like shields – with the bitter, if not cruel, irony of the number revealing itself at once horizontally in several stages and vertically, on several levels.
Horizontally, the number celebrates unlimited wealth and the powers of capitalism; it is a paean to money, something the song says ‘we’ have plenty of to get along – at a time when precisely the opposite is true.
But the “We’re in the Money” number is merely a rehearsal – it is not the actual show, which is due to open tomorrow.
And it is invariably, and ironically, connected with the Depression, which presses in on it from the outside.
Except for the producer watching the rehearsal, the theater is empty, to be presumably filled with avid theatergoers who have money and are willing to dispose of it on frivolous pleasures – such as this show.
Vertically, the authorities from the sheriff’s office storm the stage during the rehearsal to seize props and costumes because the show is being produced on credit, none of which the producer has paid back. He pleads with the sheriff’s office, saying he’ll pay the credit back as soon as he gets the receipts from the show, scheduled to open tomorrow. Nothing doing.
No one here is in any money.
Throughout the movie we simply watch the comic plot unfold and take its course, but with the stage numbers we move, or are moved (horizontally) by them, across phases of irony, counterpoint, tension, conflict, and contradiction, while descending (vertically) through the same to progressively deeper levels of trouble, dissonance, and misery.
The theater numbers are mind-boggling extravaganzas, the stage sets vast and lavish; they are colossal, larger-than-life, epic, almost beyond our ability to grasp. It is all imagined for us.
We, watching the movie, are shown what the audience in the theater in the movie could never see. The immediate realization of being manipulated is both thrilling and unsettling. The detached force of the camera angles us further into the stage or casts us far beyond it, privileging us with a view of a grand illusion.
But as we are floated around and cast into secret and privileged dimensions at the movie’s will, we become aware of our powerlessness, and this is something the movie takes advantage of to jarring effect. Toward the end we are suddenly dropped into the horror of reality: The illusion of the stage within the film, the play within the play, so to speak, graphically transforms into the reality of the very days it is ultimately depicting, and ceases being the fantasy panacea for them.
In the movie’s second major stage-show production, centered around a composition called “Pettin’ in the Park”, the contradictions, ironies, and tensions are lined (horizontally) and stacked (vertically) against and on top of each other within the number itself.
In the number, we are treated to a light, four-season man-woman flirtation that reaches the point of unconsummated desire. But it is at this point that the idyll is destroyed.
Suddenly, we are forced to take in “a surreal sequence featuring dwarf actor Billy Barty as a baby who escapes from his stroller,” as Wikipedia so deftly puts it.
At the time of the role, Billy Barty was himself only 8 or 9 years old, making him a dwarf not yet full grown, producing the unsettling effect of an ugly compressed child in a gown and baby bonnet precocious beyond his years, resentful of his compression, and seething with secret malice and vengeance, a phony, facile innocence barely veiling the vehement ill-wishing.
As such, his sudden appearance in the number, from which point he slowly begins to take it over, is jolting and disconcerting.
What’s he doing there; what does he want?
He is not essentially harmless; he is not a force of good. From the get-go he is at best an imp and perhaps not a real child at all. He is cunning and manipulative, at first merely tauntingly mischievous; an annoying, albeit clever and resourceful, sprite possessed of the nightmarish precocity and ghoulish incipient sinistry of a changeling, a sick, twisted bogeyman demon-infant materializing out of your worst subconscious fears, filled with the promise of yet un-ripened and unloosed evil.
While our impulse is to laugh at his antics, the laughter is uneasy. He is the number’s disturbing counterpoint, a growing center of action that slowly destroys the original act by taking it over as an alternative act, as the original act’s nemesis and the cause of its ultimate destruction.
He runs interference, inventing solutions to problems by which he does not mean well. Because he appears good-natured, eager, and sincere, people gullibly give him the benefit of the doubt and blind themselves to the clear signs of his true nature.
In the last scene, the large chorus of women, which has been wooed throughout the number by the large chorus of men, comes out, each wearing a sexy metal garment.
While each man is now faced with the problem of getting his woman’s outfit off, the outfits are clearly symbolic of feminine ploys and wiles in their age-old game of hard to get. Surely, with a little tact, patience, and imagination, the men would have found ways to coax those outfits off their women – something the latter were undoubtedly anxious to have happen.
But the dwarf kid immediately jumps in with a solution, sticks his nose in where he should be unwanted, offering one of the men a can opener, with which, without even thinking to discard the object as an insult to his manhood and absurd, he begins to plow through the back of his partner’s dress, in effect ripping her open, leaving sharp edges to either side of the breach.
To be sure, this final image is funny, but it is also ugly and harsh. The woman is finally relegated to something like a canned ham. The potential beauty of the man’s ultimate triumph has been ruined and demeaned to something low, grimy, and crass. The woman is being opened up with a can opener.
By being everywhere throughout the number under varying guises and disguises, the dwarf kid finally manages to transform a world of beauty, desire, and love into something twisted, jagged, and obscene.
At the movie’s end, stark contrasts are played out through two back-to-back numbers of yet another stage show.
In the first of the two numbers, called “Waltz of the Shadows”, or “The Shadow Waltz”, we are taken on a flight of neon-lit violins carried aloft in the dark by a chorus of classically dressed beauties.
But following this number we are suddenly rushed into frenzied backstage activity and the urgent knocking on starlets’ doors to come out for the “Forgotten Man” number.
We have yet again been jolted out of our dreamlike lull.
The contrast of the final number with the one preceding is stark and shocking. From lightness and happiness we are moved horizontally into a dismal, grim and gritty scene right out of The Great Depression, which is to say, right out of the movie’s own time. The scene outside the movie is suddenly the scene inside the movie, and vice versa.
As the number moves toward its climaxing images, we are also lowered vertically into increasingly surreal and terrifying scenes of strangeness and desolation that are at once the all-too-real horrors of the times.
A woman reduced to streetwalking ambles through a poverty-stricken cityscape at night past hobos, who are returned veterans and heroes of the First World War, propped against walls. She torch recites the words to a haunting song about her man and men like him, jobless, destitute, disturbed, maimed and invalided, uncared for, ignored by the government, and betrayed by society, and then broken further by the Depression, homeless and hungry, forced to stand in bread lines and endure constant humiliation.
I don't know if he deserves a bit of sympathy
Forget your sympathy
That's alright with me
I was satisfied to drift along from day to day
Till they came and
Took my man away
Remember my forgotten man?
You put a rifle in his hand
You sent him far away
You shouted “hip-horray”
But look at him today
Remember my forgotten man
You had him cultivate the land
He walked behind a plow
The sweat fell from his brow
But look at him right now
And once he used to love me
I was happy then
He used to take care of me
Won't you bring him back again
‘Cos ever since the world began
A woman’s got to have a man
Forgetting him you see
Means you’re forgetting me
Like my
My forgotten man
And then the vast, incomprehensible stage fills with men marching in the pouring rain.
Manny Face, August 17, 2014