On Monday, January 26, at 8 p.m. (ET), the Turner Classic Movies (TCM) cable network will salute the father of the music video with the world television premiere of the original documentary Busby Berkeley: Going Through the Roof. The one-hour documentary combines never-before-seen footage of the legendary dance choreographer at work with exclusive interviews and dazzling film clips for this unprecedented portrait. In addition to the special, TCM will salute Berkeley with a week-long tribute of more than half of his greatest films, including 42ND STREET (1933), FOOTLIGHT PARADE (1933), GIRL CRAZY (1943), MILLION DOLLAR MERMAID (1952) and SMALL TOWN GIRL (1953). (See attached schedule)
Busby Berkeley: Going Through the Roof, produced by Margaret Smilow for Alternate Current Productions and directed by David Thompson, presents television's first in-depth portrait of the man who revolutionized the musical. Along with generous clips from Berkeley's greatest films, the special takes a look behind the scenes with rare archival footage of Berkeley at work and features interviews with Berkeley's colleagues and contemporary critics and historians who discuss his influence. Interview subjects include swimming star Esther Williams, dancer Dorothy Coonan Wellman, show girl Toby Wing Merrill, stunt woman Cynthia Lindsay, film scholars Richard Barrios (A Song in the Dark: The Birth of the Musical Film) and Kenneth Anger (Hollywood Babylon) and critic J. Hoberman.
Busby Berkeley's last name is listed in the Dictionary of American Slang with two meanings: "any elaborate dance number" and "any bevy of beautiful girls." That sums up the appeal of the screen's first great choreographer. Berkeley taught the camera to dance at a time when most musical numbers were filmed straight- on, as if the film audience were watching a musical on stage. With his first film, WHOOPEE! (1930), he introduced close-ups of beautiful chorus girls and details of the choreography to bring the screen to life. He was already experimenting with his eye-popping overhead shots of chorus girls in kaleidoscopic poses before he went to Warner Bros., where he scored his first smash hit with 42ND STREET in 1933. That film revived the musical at a time when audiences had lost interest in the form and made Berkeley an off-screen star.
With 42ND STREET, Berkeley established the types of musical numbers that would make his name. Most famous now are the dazzling, innovative arrays of chorus girls-on turntables for "Young and Healthy" in 42ND STREET, playing neon-lit violins for "The Shadow Waltz" in GOLD DIGGERS OF 1933, and in a massive swimming pool for "By a Waterfall" in FOOTLIGHT PARADE. Berkeley also specialized in lengthy pieces, often risque and sometimes surprisingly serious, that illustrated and even poked fun at the film's hit songs. For "Honeymoon Hotel" in FOOTLIGHT PARADE, the camera followed the problems of newlywed Dick Powell as he tries to celebrate his wedding night, eventually winding up in bed with an oversized baby played by midget Billy Barty. In Berkeley's best-known routine, "Lullaby of Broadway" from GOLD DIGGERS OF 1935 (1935), a gold digger rises at sunset to party at New York's poshest night clubs, only to fall to her death from a penthouse window.
After leaving Warner Bros. in the late '30s, Berkeley moved on to a new string of triumphs at MGM, where he helped make Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland stars in such intimate, youth-oriented musicals as BABES IN ARMS (1939) and staged some of Esther Williams's most spectacular water ballets, including the number in MILLION DOLLAR MERMAID in which she drops 50 feet into the center of a circle of swimmers. Berkeley's last film credit was for BILLY ROSE'S JUMBO (1962), for which he helped stage musical numbers for Doris Day, and as a consultant for the 1970 Broadway revival of No, No Nanette, which helped spearhead the nostalgia craze of the '70s.
Turner Classic Movies, currently seen in more than 18 million homes, is a 24-hour cable network from Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. that presents the greatest motion pictures of all time from the largest film library in the world, the combined Time Warner and Turner film libraries, from the '20s through the '80s, commercial-free and without interruption. For more information, please visit the TCM website at (http://TCM.turner.com).
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