One has to see The Gang's All Here to believe it. After being a "dance director" on Warner Brothers movies in the 30's (42nd Street and Footlight Parade, both from 1933) Berkely gets a chance with Fox to do this extraordinary musical for those of us that think that too many musicals have too little music and dance. In The Gang's All Here the music never stops in this story about WWII New York and Brazilian dancer Carmen Miranda, who sings and dances in the most opulent number "The Lady in the Tutti Frutti Hat," in which 80 female dancers dance with bananas as big as canoes, though most of the dancing is done by Berkley's camera, as it gracefully glides through the bananas and shoots kaleidoscope shots from overhead. Star Alice Faye gets to sing some intimate songs by Harry Warren and Leo Robin, including "No Love, No Nothing" as she does the ironing at home while waiting for her sweetheart to return from the war and "A Journey to a Star" on the Staten Island Ferry as she gets to know soldier James Ellison who, strangely, neither sings nor dances.
The film also includes Charlotte Greenwood, who does some great dancing and at one point picks up her cat thinking it's a telephone in this musical comedy without enough comedy, even though Eugene Palette and Edward Everett Horton give it a good try, along with too many manglings of the English language by Carmen Miranda. The final number is the hallucinatory "Polka Dot Polka," which seems to be an influence on Kubrick's finale for 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Because of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musicals had changed considerably since Berkeley's time at Warner Brothers. In The Gang's All Here Berkeley does make a slight reference to Astaire/ Rogers with the dancing team of Tony and Sally DeMarco but Berkeley's style is on the way out and Gene Kelly is on the way in (his first movie was in 1942) but Berkeley goes out with excessive and impressive style.
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