In a Dark Time, the Eye begins to See: A Review of Busby Berkeley’s “By a Waterfall”
“I hereby grant your rascal camera full access to my crotch!” They seem to laugh indulgently (lashes curled, eyelids a flutter). “After all, Busby-wusby, it’s for a good cause!”
And what a cause, indeed.
American poet Theodore Roethke once wrote that “In a dark time, the eye begins to see.” Well. I’d say the Depression counts as a dark time, wouldn’t you? And oh what audience eyes were able to see!
Perhaps they nearly popped out in shock (I could be exaggerating).
Nevertheless, I can’t help thinking those viewing Busby Berkeley’s 1933 film Footlight Parade for the first time must have been surprised (delighted) at what that brazen (outlandish!) director had to show them.
A pioneer of the mobile camera, Berkeley felt shooting straight on was limiting—a surrender to the logistical constraints the theater should have to deal with, not film. So it should come as no surprise he granted his viewers glances of lithe young bodies slithering around sensuously from the unprecedented—if unspecific—angles of “below” or “above.”
Add the camera’s new positioning to a bleak-era’s collective need for vicarious extravagance to the zany vision of a heterosexual choreographer-director, and you’ll have quite the show.
Reading a bit on the plot will illuminate the fact that the musical number, “By a Waterfall,” takes place in order to impress both audiences and a theater owner with the power to make or break a director’s career.
What ensues amounts to a possibly gratuitous display of ultra meta (we’re talking show within show within show within the original show itself—the film—here) performances. Dick Powell’s slightly emasculated and overpowering vibrato share an idyllic call-and-response singing scene with Ruby Keeler’s unexpectedly deep voice as the two commence the song, “By a Waterfall.”
The charming strains worm their way into your consciousness until you find yourself humming it on a walk or hearing it—complete with ‘30s era chorus—replaying in your head in a twilight zone-esque descant to the rest of your thoughts.
Looking appropriately like the time’s Bettie Boop-like ideal (tiny mouthed and delicate, short haired and pointy faced), Keeler implausibly transforms into a sort of long-haired dryad. The grassy patch on which she and Powell have been sitting (all along a stage) gives way to grotto, and—voila!—a group of lovely, body-suit clad, near-naked, nipple-less women appear, languishing on wet rocks…by a waterfall…while singing along to…“By a Waterfall.”
And here’s where the fun begins.
The women, indistinguishable from one another, subside into a meticulously choreographed aquatic number in which they splash about (some wearing metallic hair reminiscent of the recent Art Deco or a Gustav Klimt painting), eventually landing in gymnasium-sized pool!
At this point, the unfortunate individual rigid enough not to have suspended disbelief long before will have to relinquish all claims to it now, as what follows is nothing short of fantastical.
Women collectively dive into the large basin from great heights, as their leader, presumably Keeler, cuts through their scissor-formation in a move that from above appears animated. And suddenly, these modern-day mermaids bend into water-bound shapes that filmed from the bird’s eye view look geometric, kaleidoscopic and impeccable.
It would, perhaps, be unwise to ask the foolish question “why?” when Berkeley could just as easily respond with “because we can!” Who knew humans could be capable of such synchronized movement? (No, no, please don’t answer that.) The figures bend to and fro in a large unified snake that at one point resembles an autocratic intestine.
We get the impression no individual really matters here. What’s more, any weak link, any woman desiring to stand out at an inappropriate moment (i.e. in the midst of creating the tangled-limb-formed-human-
wheels) would be excommunicated from the Berkeley family and its disciples.
And maybe that’s what’s called for. Berkeley hands the film’s eager theater owner, its audiences and the real audiences (today’s viewers and those originally paying the meager fare for a matinee and a moment’s respite from the day’s drudgery and grim landscape) an escape. He hands them proof that magic could exist—women could band together to make intricate shapes or a man could fall asleep to the tender whisperings of a panoply of goddesses.
Footlight Parade is the real Purple Rose of Cairo—the valium to the Depression era housewife, the romance novel to a spinster, the hastily hidden and sneekily-procured porn mag belonging to the lonely teenaged boy—and, possibly a propos to today’s events, the bright spot (crotch shots and all) on which the eye may focus in what is, at the end, a dark time.