Jeez-a-sneeze, I needs more time to watch all these movies. Anyway, a couple more 'films of interest':
“The Clock” (Vincente Minnelli, Fred Zinnemann, Tex Avery)
Battle of the Sexes Two of Hollywood’s most deliriously stylized movies, Busby Berkeley’s “The Gang’s All Here,” from 1943, and Vincente Minnelli’s “The Clock,” from 1945, are now available on DVD. Both are Second World War romances involving soldiers on brief furloughs in New York, and their ornate flourishes embellish the tensions of life in wartime.
Busby Berkeley movies always inspire me to pretend I've ingested something psychedelic: the films I've seen are packed with grand moments of swirling cameras and twirling dancers. Famously parodied/referenced in The Big Lebowski.
Berkeley’s vertiginous musical, featured in “The Alice Faye Collection” (Fox), was filmed in Technicolor, and the gaudy palette inspired the director’s most extravagant visual inventions, starting with a musical number done in long, swooping takes running from a dark soundstage to a shipyard that is revealed to be the colossal set of a Manhattan night club where Carmen Miranda and her tutti-frutti hat hold sway. .... Several dance routines feature Berkeley’s classic geometric choreography (including the legendary one with giant bananas), but the film’s concluding “Polka Dot Polka,” which kaleidoscopically dissolves the characters into an erotic swirl of color, suggests that the freedom being fought for was largely sexual freedom.
Tags: Film, /film_history, /Netflix
