Carmen Miranda, wearing a fruit bowl hat and drawn on a banana cart pulled by gold-painted oxen, arrives on a Hollywood back lot tropical scene already populated by beauties in short skirts and flaring midriffs. Her entry in The Gang's All Here (1943) is relatively restrained by the standards of her director, Busby Berkeley, but soon enough the chorus begin playing xylophones made of plastic bananas and dancers encircle the stage holding five-foot phallic bananas over their heads, raising and lowering the fruit in patterns like the opening and closing of flowers. It was colorful entertainment; a world at several arms length from reality and it was Berkeley's stock in trade ever since he arrived in Hollywood during the Great Depression.
Aside from an irony-loving audience savoring the sheer kitsch of it all, Berkeley tends to be a love him or hate him filmmaker. He is the subject of the latest biography by Jeffrey Spivak, Buzz: The Life and Art of Busby Berkeley (published by University Press of Kentucky). Spivak falls into the love category, commending Berkeley for saving the musical from death, saving a studio from collapse, for being a good colleague and a great craftsman "whose work is neither dated nor dismissible."
To be sure, Berkeley can't be dismissed for taking the Hollywood musical to gaudy reaches of fantasy. Dated? While incredibly outrageousness, his productions can't escape the pop culture of their era. Their expiration date is stamped sometime in the post-World War II years when Berkeley's care began to go spotty. But during the 1930s and early '40s, before alcohol and other problems seemed to take their toll, he was at the top of Hollywood's game. Berkeley was an officer in World War I and one of Spivak's revelations concerns the influence of military drill on his choreography. The precision of the parade ground was only a short march to the sound stage. Berkeley's contribution was to employ the camera as an active participant in his productions, coupled with a feverish imagination. Whether or not Berkeley was conversant with Surrealism, he arrived at a similar place through his odd juxtapositions of images from the popular culture of his time.
