Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933)

Save your money for something good and enjoyable

Really Surprised!

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

The plot isn't so bad, but the pace of storytelling is too slow which makes people bored. Certain moments are so obvious and unnecessary for the main plot. I would've fast-forwarded those moments if it was an online streaming. The ending looks like implying a sequel, not sure if this movie will get one

Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933) is incredibly hard to categorize. All at once, it's a musical extravaganza, romantic comedy, satire, and biting social commentary of the Great Depression. Few films are so thoroughly of their time and place, to the point where they can give us something of a glimpse into the mindset of the period in which they were created. The cast reads like a who's who of early 1930s Hollywood: Joan Blondell, Ginger Rogers, Warren William, Ruby Keeler, and Dick Powell to name a few. Each actor is dazzling.It's also a microcosm of pre-code subversiveness. The values of the moral guardians of the day are thoroughly mocked on almost every topic, from sex to class. With the exception of Baby Face (1933), few other pre-codes were as gleefully devious. A must watch for everyone.

Millionaire turned composer Brad (Dick Powell) rescues unemployed Broadway people with a new play.You know, I'm very hit and miss on musicals. Some I really like, like "Seven Brides for Seven Brothers". Many more I could probably do without. This one is alright, though it could never be my favorite. The most notable song is "Petting in the Park", which seems rather risqué for the 1930s (but maybe I'm wrong).The only thing really making this film redeeming today is Ginger Rogers. Most of the other actors involved, including Dick Powell, have been largely forgotten. How this film continues to resonate with today's audiences, I have no idea. Most likely it does not.

Like many of the movies involving Busby Berkeley, the impact made on viewers by GOLD DIGGERS OF 1933 likely will be counter-intuitive. Other than being promised several times earlier in the story, Berkeley's closing ballad of The Forgotten Man has merely a tenuous relationship to the previous 95 percent of this film. Yet it catches the essence not only of its fictional world, but also the flavor of the atrocities waged against ordinary Americans by the Hoover Administration in the early 1930s, as well as the Corporate-purchased U.S. Administrations and Congresses of the 21st Century, which have allowed a concentration of wealth that now exceeds that prompting Theodore Roosevelt to bust the trusts of the Robber Barons even before Teddy's cousin Franklin socialized much of the American economy. Perhaps Berkeley's chief accomplishment was to get his truth into a format entertaining enough to win over not only the public well off enough to be able to spare a dime for the movies, but also the suits at Warner Brothers (though they admittedly WERE notoriously cheap, and consequently always on the look-out for anything sensational). Michael Moore's tirades of today cannot hold a candle to the subtly subversive power of this GOLD DIGGERS, which features sexy girls socking it to the rich guys before standing up and shouting out for their own "forgotten men."

This is supposed to be a pseudo-remake of 1929's "Gold Diggers of Broadway", except in the four year interim the Great Depression is in full swing and our gold diggers have hit on bad times like everyone else. The second Berkeley film in the Warner series of musicals starts off with Ginger Rogers singing "We're in the Money" in an outrageous number in which the chorus girls are all dressed in over-sized coins. As Ginger sings part of the number in pig-Latin, the whole thing seems surreal, and in a way it is. The sheriff breaks in on the number to repossess everything on the set to settle the debts of the show's producer, and the gold diggers are out of work again. I don't know why I keep calling them gold diggers, because this cadre of chorines are just looking for steady work. They have abandoned all hope of getting millionaire husbands to take them away from all of this.Brad Roberts (Dick Powell) comes to their rescue when he comes up with both the money and the songs for a new show that broke but creative producer Barney Hopkins (Ned Sparks) has in mind. Thinking that Brad is penniless like the rest of them, the girls at first think Brad is playing a tasteless joke before he produces the 15K, and that he is a bank robber on the run afterwards. This is reinforced by his refusal to make any personal appearance in the show. In fact Brad is a young man from a wealthy New England family who is hiding his work in the theatre from his snobbish old-money relatives who soon surface to reclaim him in the person of his brother, Lawrence (Warren William), and the family lawyer (Guy Kibbee). When they find out Brad is planning to marry one of the girls (Ruby Keeler), Brad's brother decides to find the girl, flash his cash, and thus romance her himself, since he presumes she is a gold digger. He figures this will prove to Brad just what kind of girl he has fallen for. Unfortunately, Brad's brother doesn't know what she looks like. And that's where the fun starts.There's some great pre-code comedy here particularly from Joan Blondell, not to mention her stirring performance of "Forgotten Man" about World War I soldiers who are now marching in Depression Era bread lines. Also not to be missed is "Shadow Waltz" with the chorus girls playing fake fluorescent violins that would occasionally short out and shock the girls.Guy Kibbee and Aline McMahon are both terrifically funny and touching in one of the film's subplots as two people who find genuine love later in life than they may have wanted and originally planned. They are basically reprising the roles played by Albert Gran and Winnie Lightner in Gold Diggers of Broadway. However, Aline MacMahon has a subtle even homespun brand of humor versus Lightner's brash style.As in The Gold Diggers of Broadway, the film ends with the show itself, but these are two entirely different shows for two entirely different eras. The 1929 film ends with chorus girls parading around in elaborate costumes and decorated by two-strip Technicolor while acrobats and tap dancers strut their exhilarated stuff. The 1933 film ends with a number about forgotten men marching both off to war and back to bread lines in spartan black and white. A powerful ending for a great piece of entertainment.