Session sixty-five, Illegal_Cinema

Gold Diggers of 1933 (Busby Berkeley, 1933) 1h 37min. Dir: Mervyn LeRoy.

“Gold diggers” were fortune-hunting chorus girls on Broadway. The term also became the title of a saga of Broadway musical shows in 1919 which were turned into films, first silent, then with soundtracks.

Busby Berkeley worked in four of such films – Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933), Gold Diggers of 1935 (1935), Gold Diggers of 1937 (1936) and Gold Diggers in Paris (1938).as a choreographer and/or director. His choreographies for chorus girls, actors, and the camera are famous and have to a large extent defined the musical genre. But Busby Berkeley also worked for World War I, where he choreographed parades of up to 1200 soldiers and was an aerial observer.

Gold Diggers of 1933 is also a Pre-Code film. There is kind of audacity in it that surprised me the first time I saw it.

Ainara Elgoibar (Mungia, 1975) is an artist. She tends to see things from the camera operator’s perspective when she watches films. She is currently coordinating the Bulegoa z/b Illegal_Cinema sessions.