Gold Diggers of 1933
Sunday, April 09, 2006
The "Pettin' in the Park" sequence from Gold Diggers of 1933, directed by Busbey Berkley, begins innocuously enough. ADVICE FOR YOUNG LOVERS in gilt on the cover of an oversized book, held in the hand of a young man, as a young women looks over his shoulder. He wears a straw hat. They sit on a bench in front of some pasteboard bushes. The cloying title song begins, in which the man and women admonish each other for being "bad boys" and "bad girls." He squeezes the girl tightly and they rock back and forth. She breaks into a tapdance number.
Reveal the chimps, imitating the young lover's behavior in a zoo. A gaggle of cops nod and point. Pan to a myriad of lovers, some of them elderly, rocking on their own benches. A baby peers out of a baby carriage. The baby is "cute," not microenchephalic--this has to be mentioned, because when the camera closes on him we see that he leers with a preternaturally adult face. In fact, he looks a little like Dick Powell, the young man from the opening. The man-baby gets involved with a bit of business with a pea shooter and some cops, the upshot of which is he passes through a canal of cop legs gliding on rollerskates. Suddenly, winter happens.
Blonde girls throw snowballs at big, fit men. They dance and coalesce, forming a giant white O, and undulate together like a hot, fat sea anemone in the snow. The man-baby from the last bit pops out of it, if you can believe that, and crawls into a set representing springtime. From there he crawls into a woman's dress. Her naked legs are exposed down to the hip. More leering. The camera pulls back and finds lots of similar women rocking back and forth with the big, fit men. The rain starts and the women get behind a scrim to strip. The man-boy emerges in a raincoat. He winks at us and raises the scrim. The women emerge with tin corsets on. Dick Powell, back again, knocks on a corset and looks bemused. His woman is wet. The man-boy emerges with a can opener. Big wink. On and on, until you begin to think, christ, did they involve chimps in this thing?
posted by Greg Purcell @ 12:50 PM,
