Remembering Busby Berkeley

"I always named 'em the Berkeley Girls, and no one picked any girls but me. I picked 'em all. Always." Busby Berkeley's voice rumbled like a semi-active volcano. "Once a producer came up to me and said, 'Buz, that one on the end looks cute,' and I said, 'Oh, sit down.' People have the damnedest ideas about beauty."

It's been 37 years since Kenneth Turan interviewed Busby Berkeley, then a crusty but still energetic 75, in a Berlin hotel room, but the memory remains vivid. Just like his singular films, which recently got a very welcome 10-picture retrospective at the Hammer Museum's Billy Wilder Theater courtesy of the UCLA Film & Television Archive.

The series was called "Sex and the Single Girl: The Escapades of Busby Berkeley" and focused on the arcane academic notion of the "seraglio effect," but the eye-popping dance numbers Berkeley created during a long career in Hollywood need to be seen -- and seen on a big screen -- because they are, plain and simple, an enormous amount of fun.
Because his name is so euphonious, it's likely that more people have heard of Berkeley than have seen his astonishing dance numbers in their entirety. These routines so dominated the films they were in that if Berkeley wasn't the director, he got second billing as the person who "created and directed" the sequences. These were not two- or three-minute interludes but super-elaborate affairs that could go on for 10 minutes each and in "Footlight Parade" make up almost all of the film's final half hour.

"I never bothered with the directors who did the dramatic parts of the pictures; most of the times I'd never even see them," Berkeley told me in Berlin. "They did their job and I did mine. Of course, my sections were more expensive. We once figured out they cost about $10,000 per minute on the screen, and people yelled about that, but I hollered 'em down."

Even at $10,000 per minute, Berkeley gave the studios their money's worth. To see his dizzying routines, rife with overhead shots that emphasized elaborate kaleidoscopic patterns constructed of bare female legs, is the equivalent of taking a mind-altering drug before you enter the theater. No one had seen anything like this before Berkeley thought it up, and no one has seen anything like it since.

(Excerpts from Kenneth Turan's "Critic's Notebook")