For Busby Berkeley’s birthday: Remember My Forgotten Man

I must start out this post with a piece I wrote originally for the Musings blog at Oscilloscope (it was included in a book!), and now lives on my site (since it’s off the Musings blog). It’s about the similarities between Gold Diggers of 1933 and Sucker Punch. The piece had been percolating for years. I love the title: Remember My Forgotten Women: The Dire Worlds of Sucker Punch and Gold Diggers of 1933.

And here are some thoughts on Gold Diggers, some of which I cover in the piece above. There’s more to be said about Busby Berkeley and his kaleidoscopic choreography/cinematography … but for today:

The Gold Diggers of 1933 stands alone. It breaks all the rules. It creates its own movie-musical mould. Topical to the extreme, ripped from the headlines, it combines capitalistic fantasy musical numbers with gold coins and girls and spread legs and luxury with the brutal realities of the real 1933 world, not to mention – in the final number – the huge issue of WWI veterans (also handled in Heroes for Sale, a furiously angry film from the same year), still struggling to integrate back into society, dealing with shell-shock, depression, drug addiction (the result of war-time morphine use). In Gold Diggers, especially in the last number “Remember My Forgotten Man”, the gloves come off. The number addresses the issue of the “forgotten men” head on. It’s everyone’s issue. The number cries out to the audience: “Look. See. Don’t forget. There are people who need your help. Remember them. In the midst of your own pain, remember them.” It’s not just a musical number. It’s a call to action. There are those who still consider even addressing such issues as somehow unpatriotic (talk to current-day veterans about some of their issues with proper health care, mental health, dealing with PTSD, being thrown away by the institutions that sent them off to war in the first place).

Of course all Americans struggled during the Depression, not just returning veterans. But that is the radical and compassionate point of the last number of Gold Diggers: In the midst of your own struggle, don’t forget to take care of those in need. That “hobo” on the street could be a war hero. He fought for you. Do not forget him. It gives me goosebumps just thinking about it. I volunteer with a local veterans’ group. Every time I see “Remember my Forgotten Man,” it is a reminder why. Gold Diggers, made during the first breathlessly terrible years of the Great Depression, is still innovative today. I watch it and still find myself thinking, “Who DOES this?? Who has the balls to DO this?”

“Remember My Forgotten Man”, starts simply and introspectively, with a pained Joan Blondell, by herself, speaking out her anxiety about the “forgotten men”. Etta Moten joins in, a wail of shared anguish from above, and finally, the cast of hundreds (all men) pour forth from every corner. In Joan Blondell: A Life between Takes, author Matthew Kennedy writes:

[Busby] Berkeley was one of the few artists at Warner Bros. to be given a virtual blank check after 42nd Street. The swirling, intoxicating kaleidoscope that he achieved with his all-female choruses in Gold Diggers of 1933 confirmed the studio’s judgment. [Ginger] Rogers and chorus open with “We’re In the Money”, festooned with giant coins fulfilling the sartorial duties of bikinis, boas, and hats. It is a lavish ode to American optimism, punctuated by the arrival of the sheriff and his posse to close the show for lack of funds. In Gold Diggers of 1933, the Depression is literally waiting just outside the stage door.

The movie’s last production, “Remember My Forgotten Man,” stood apart. Gone are the rows of alabaster lovelies singing lilting melodies of love. Instead, there are 150 male extras as soldiers or hobos. It may seem that the downbeat “Remember My Forgotten Man” came out of nowhere to put a damper on all the fun that preceded it, but Gold Diggers of 1933 has frequent references to the harsh realities of the time. The number was simply the culmination of an anger and anxiety that had been treated more lightly in the movie’s earlier reels.

Joan [Blondell] was not the most musical of stars. Her dancing was passable, but she was wanting vocally. Her singing voice was, in fact, everything her speaking voice was not – flat, limited in range, and uninteresting. Berkeley was not deterred. “It was a spectacle type of number and a good one to use in those dark days of the Depression when many people had forgotten about the guys who had gone to war for our country,” he said. “I did something extraordinary in that number, too, when I had Joan Blondell sing the song because Joan Blondell can’t sing. But I knew she could act it. I knew she could ‘talk it’ and put over the drama for me.”

Joan is galvanizing in “Remember My Forgotten Man.” In her few moments with the song she is sultry, vulnerable, bitter, and yearning. She is then followed by the magnificent Etta Moten, who provides the song a vocal melody. Later still, the soldiers, then bums, make for a powerful musicalization of politics and history. “Remember My Forgotten Man” is perhaps the most socially urgent song ever conceived for an American musical film.

Though it is specific to the Depression and the treatment of World War I veterans in a nation wanting for food and work, “Remember My Forgotten Man” has never gone out of date. What is government’s responsibility to the dispossessed? What are the effects of war and neglect on women? Joan’s character speaks to an ambivalence of the moment when she looks at a hard-luck veteran and says, “I don’t know if he deserves a bit of sympathy.” As someone reduced to streetwalking, the question could be asked of her as well. In six minutes and forty-five seconds, Berkeley treats us to prostitution, homelessness, veterans marching in the rain, bread lines, and desolate womanhood. The final image is a three-layered design of choreographic genius. In the back is a human canvas of marching soldiers in silhouette on multileveled semicircular pathways. In the middle is Joan, her arms outstretched in V formation for the final tableau. Surrounding her is a mass of hungry men, former vets. They reach out to her in communion, each a victim of society’s betrayal.

Jack Warner did not originally conceive of “Forgotten Man” as the finale of Gold Diggers of 1933, but it was so powerful it could not be inserted anywhere else. Joan was modest about the whole experience and hesitant to admit that she was at the center of an emblematic image of the Depression. Gold Diggers of 1933 cost $433,000 to make and earned a $2 million profit. Those figures placed it alongside 42nd Street as the biggest moneymaker of the year for Warner Bros. and among the top five of the year overall.

She says, “Forgetting him, you see, means you’re forgetting me, like my forgotten man.”

Personal favorite moment in a musical number filled with great moments: Watch for her gesture at the very final moment of the song. She doesn’t just put her arms up into the air. She pushes them up. There is resistance to the gesture, the air is heavy, she has to push those arms up. The gesture is only seen in long-shot and she is surrounded by a cast of hundreds. But my God does that gesture carry. It reaches the cheap seats and beyond. The pain of the masses, the hope for a better future, the human condition is in that gesture.