“Golddiggers of 1933” is a complex conxoction of a musical movie where audience decide what is right because the people to which they identify say so, and not all literature works that way.
The title of this article is deliberately ambiguous. It refers, first of all, to the movies that were dominated in black and white, especially since sound, which meant from the Thirties through the Sixties, and emphasized story, dialogue and character, possibly because scripts were based on stories and plays. There were very worthy movies later on, notably by Francis Ford Coppola and Nora Efron and the Jane Austen adaptations, but what generally emerges were spectacles based on spectacle and action and a dumbing down to meet its audience, while black and white movies were offered as family fare, where everyone could be both entertained and enlightened. Remember that this was true since the movies started. The movies were not experimentalists aimed at the cognoscenti nor, at the other extreme, aiming at titillating the riff-raff. Neither Modernism nor girlie shows. As William B. Mayer thought, he had led the American people through World War II and he would do it again in Korea. A mighty calling.
Second of all, “black and white” also means straightforward and clear, which means that the moral message is usually quite obvious, though how that is accomplished in movies is quite different from the way it is done in other ages of literature. Aristotle articulates the process in classica;drama. In “Oedipus Rex”, the protagonist soffit a number of coincidental encounters whereby he kills his father and marries his mother. His failure is that he insists on unravelling a mystery better left alone. The anxiety the audience senses of what will be unfolded ceases to any longer be fear and terror but a different emotion than that: The catharsis, this transformation, is a resignation to the fact that people are subject to the fates, that this is to be borne, and that is the wisdom earned from experiencing the drama. So there is a single moral message and it is to be learned from all tragedies.
Shakespeare has a very different way of arriving at moral conclusions. From “Richard III” on, with the exception of Prince Hal. leading figures are twisted souls, each in their different ways, and play out their distinctive doom. Hamlet dithers; Macbeth gets a taste for blood; Othello cannot but distrust his good fortune. All of them are cursed in their distinctive vices and audiences are made aware of these and put on guard of a bestiary of emotions to avoid because the audience has experienced one or all of them. No catharsis; only warnings.
The movies create morals in a different way, and that may explain why movies are felt as superficial, though also because they are bathed in melodrama. Which means exaggerated emotions endlessly repeated so everyone can get the point. The audience is also expected to identify rather than to be horrified by the protagonist and therefore comes to take on the attributes of the protagonist's amoral goods. So Bette Davis in “Dark Victory” covers up her fatal illness, even from her husband, supposedly to spare grief from her loved ones, as if that were a virtue; no moaning; only stoicism. That is what to emulate though that is now out of fashion, people aware of the impending doom of others, celebrating one another to the last. Maybe the Davis option always seemed a stretch but you could try it out for size for the length of a movie. Or try out the problematic Citizen Kane for his flamboyance and even for the indulgence of making his mistress a movie star because he could and who would avoid the temptation were it available. Movies are about dreams, not nightmares, unless they want to do that.
Indeed, movies were great art early on in their history, however much they were few recognized as such until the Fifties. Yes,there was Dreyer's “Joan of Arc" but also the Big Parade” where a screenwriter found an image to sum up an experience, as when an onlooker of a parade was seen to be drumming his feet in cadence, showing he would enlist, or soldiers slowly advancing into a French forest, or a limping veteran rushing to meet his French girlfriend after the war. Sentimental but so are many real emotions.
A good example of a movie that is not considered art but mere popular entertainment but is more elevated and to be considered art is the backstage musical “Gold Diggers of 1933”. Yes, it has cliches and stereotypes and threadbare but it earns some depth by treating the chorus girls as the new working class, having to work on Broadway so as not to do worse things, and gains even more depth if the audience catches on that the story line, the book of the musical, is all fake, a set of evasions from reality, while the musical production numbers are telling the truth about theDepression and the nature of love. THe movie is mean and lurid and that is to be noticed, moreso, say, than the wholesomeness of “Singing In The Rain”.
The premise of the story is that a songwriter recently hired to write the songs and lyrics for a new show can forward ten thousand dollars to back it because he is really rich but he wants to write popular rather than long hair music. Quite a stretch, but what the hell. This is just a musical after all. And he also sings and the leading lady is his sweetie. So goes the book in a black and white musical. With the exception of “Showbat”, whose black and white movie was made in 1936 starring Irene Dunne and featuring Paul Robeson, that denigration of the plots as just excuses to pass the time between production numbers applied to the Rogers-Astaire movies. R mistaken identity or a pledge to an absent sweetheart was enough of a gimmick to keep it going. Hollywood hired Berlin, Kern and Gershwin to write the songs for the dazzling duo but no significant writer to handle that end.
The same was true of “Golddiggers of 1933”. The bit of plot is that two old swells are out to dissuade Polly from Brad, his rich songwriter, because years before they had their fling with chorus girls. The comedy arises when the theatrical girls decide to make fools of the rich old guts because they accuse the girls of being golddiggers. So the girls act as if they are golddiggers, getting the men to buy expensive hats for the girls and giving a check for ten thousand dollars to pay off Polly, but the cheque was placed in a frame to show it was a trophy rather than an exchange. But everything in the plot is falsified. There is the trope that women can get men anything that they want when in fact men could exploit poor girls with money and the men were not the worst for doing so as in , where Alfredo goes on to his life after having sowed his wild oats and his theatrical girlfriend languishes and dies. And another falsification is that the two old rich men fall for the two chorines and marry them for love. So aren’ t they just successful gold diggers except for the comic reversal of saying that is not the case? There are devices of deception to keep the plot comic by shrouding it with euphemisms.
While the plot of the movie shows characters as mean-spirited and sexually exploitative, the musical numbers are powerful because they are so direct in their sexual, social and political declarations and images. There are only four production numbers in the movie and you would have thought more given their impact. Ihe first production number follows immediately on the titles. It shows in the faces of pretty and animated young women wearing clothing of coins happily and excitedly singing “We’re In the Money" which is clearly not the case but not a falsification because the earnestness of their expression shows they are desperate to get money, that money is the most important thing and that proven by the number, which turns out to be part of a Broadway rehearsal number, interrupted by a sheriff who ends it for failure to pay bills. The “real” story is frustration while the production number is an aspiration, and that is true of the other production numbers> accounts of what is really real.
The second number takes place with a lively ditty called "Walking on the Park”, whereby couples of all ages and stations sit companionably on park benches, Then it starts raining and a bevy of wet chorines go beyond screens to change their clothes and so they can see them doing that in silhouette. There is a child who is really a leering midget looking behind the screen. When the chorines emerge,they are dressed in tin coverings, to which the men respond by taking canopeners to open them up. Ruby Keeler and Dick Powell also do that, leering at one another. Romance is followed by lewdness. This is one of the naughtiest scenes of movie sexuality despite the fact that little skin is shown.
The third number is a rhapsodic song without lyrics, which is enough to show that it is for highbrows, to give normal folk an entrance into that life while still palatable. The song is set to villains which are lighted and shifted around, violating the cannons of either theatrical or visual verisimilitude. The lighted violins; using the shapes of violins itself sufficiently highbrow, are duplicated over and over again and seen from different angles and arrangements. Recognize that Berkeley is being quite original. He is neither surreal or expressionist, which was from a decade before. He was topographical in that he was altering geometric shapes into patterns and then once and again modifying those shapes, his art not emulated until the road runner movies, though high brows might think his creations as jokes and low brows might think them merely spectacular. What Berkely accomplishes is a facsimile of the grandeur of what a no longer depression world would be like, also foretold in the Radio City Music Hall, with its grandeur, uts spaces, its clean lines and luxury, that anyone could enter with the price of admission. This is the art of the future that Trotsky thought might be invented. But Berkekey did not write about it, because he wasn't a literary or art critic but merely a genius.
The final production number of the movie is the forgotten man number which had been telegraphed in the producer’s plan for the Broadway production and which ends the movie, no backstage business ensuing after that. It contains a mournful dirge that reminds people of the plight of the Bonis Marchers who fought the fight and then left in pennery by the Depression. That isn’t right. Joan Blondell, dressed like a flashy working class girl who has been around, shows a policeman about to assault a bum that he is wearing an award for valor. The most visually striking presentation is of soldiers walking, trudging, through the rain, not really possible on a supposed theatre stage, supporting their wounded buddies as they carry on in war. The illusion is that this is a theatrical event and so the soldiers move along moving ramps so as to give a sense of how a theatrical performance would do that, and so its fakery makes the experience conveyed as authentic, the real McCoy. And then the movie ends. There is nothing else to add. The social, sexual and political situations have been said.
What is the moral basis for “Golddoggers of 1933? It is the people with womb the audience identify that say who is right and wrong, Ruby Keeler and Dick Powell say that it is ok to haze the two old rich men who insulted girls by calling them golddiggers and so proceed to humiliate them. The same two made it alright to act lascivious because they did it. Hoan Blondell reminded people that it was not right for the war veterans to be forgotten. The same is true throughout the era of black and white movies that continued in dramas and comedies. In “Marty” Ernest Borgnine decides to continue dating a plain bit companionable girl because he does;t want to be lonely. It is his decision about the right thing to do. It is an acceptable choice because he declared it as such and then it makes sense and acceptable. Sabrina decides for the old rich man and so a generation before would have been thought a golddigger even though she had gotten some degree of education, Billy Wilder always thinking people to have ulterior motives,
Then motivations changed, certainly by 1975, the time of “The Godfather”. None of the characters in the major Coppola movies were people with whom to identify, not even Diane Keaton, who is a white bread foil for all those smouldering Italians. Color was incidental, just a marker of a cultural change also happening. In Coppula’s case morality originated in custom even if made by choice. The same happens in sitcoms. “Sleepless in Seattle” does not portray Meg Ryan as having done the right thing to pursue Tom Hanks. She is just inclined to, and the whole meaning emerges in the final scene where the couple unite in the Empire State Building and she begins their life together by nodding in acquiescence, waiting for what he will do next. That is also custom, just like every wife mentioned in “Sleepless in Seattle” as knowing the movie soaper “An Affair To Remember”. That also is tradition or custom. Cultural change is deeper than technology.