The Gang's All Here (1943)

Very disappointing...

Memorable, crazy movie

Good story, Not enough for a whole film

To all those who have watched it: I hope you enjoyed it as much as I do.

If you loved the great black & white Berkeley films of the thirties, you are in for a real treat with this movie. Busby Berkeley's musical numbers shot in beautiful Technicolor are a real treat.As you probably know, Berkeley was on loan to Fox for this film, and it seemed to bring out the best in him. The plot was typical Berkeley, including the love triangle, the "putting on a show" subplot, and the nobody becoming a star. The only real difference is, being filmed in 1943, there was also a military subplot.But the plot in a Berkeley film is mostly irrelevant. How can you beat a movie with dancing bananas, neon polka dots, disembodied heads, Benny Goodman's music (and singing), Carmen Miranda's hats, and the delightful Eugene Palette? Twentieth Century Fox has really done up the DVD right. The picture is beautiful, with consistent colors, and nary a scratch or a dust mark to be seen. If you like Berkeley or musicals in general, you really need to see this movie.

I'll get to the plot of Busby Berkeley's "The Gang's All Here" in a minute, because the plot isn't the most memorable part of this movie. The most memorable part is the bananas.About 20 minutes into the movie, a towering hat of Technicolor fruit appears on the screen, followed by its owner--'40s "Brazilian bombshell" Carmen Miranda. She proceeds to do a number called "The Lady in the Tutti-Frutti Hat," accompanied by chorus girls who bear bananas. Six-foot-tall bananas that continuously droop and sprout until number's end, when the chorus girls, worn out by the burden of this mutated fruit, lay down for a long siesta on a stage dressed up like an island.There's a reason this number occurs so early on: It takes you the rest of the movie to convince yourself you actually saw this in a 1943 movie.But then, this is from Busby Berkeley, a director who staged his musical numbers as though he was declaring war. And next to kitsch, war is pretty much the motivator here.The wafer-thin story involves Andy (James Ellison), a soldier who woos and wins Edie (Alice Faye), a canteen dancer, the night before Andy goes off to World War Two. In what seems an instant, Andy gets decorated and returned home to a victory party thrown by the family of Andy's childhood sweetheart and fiancée--who, unfortunately for Edie, is not Edie.Will the heartbreak be resolved? Do you really care? The plot is mostly an excuse for some snappy repartee between major '40s stars (in particular, Eugene Palette and Edward Everett Horton are hilarious), and the kind of musical numbers that seem to drop out of thin air. (In a couple of scenes, Benny Goodman and his orchestra stroll by and do some songs just for the heck of it.) "The Gang's All Here" is really a 1943 time capsule, but an eye-popping rouser of one. They don't make 'em like this anymore. They didn't make 'em much like this back then, either.

Director and choreographer Busby Berkeley is in his element and is at his best with a new star, Miss Carmen Miranda! Carmen Miranda? You don't know her! Well, after this you will. A petite lady with a larger-than-life persona who can dazzle you with her spirit and stage presence. Alice Faye gets top billing and this movie can be found on a Alice Faye DVD collection as well as Carmen's DVD set, but Miss Miranda stops the show cold with some of her best showcases put on screen: the banana song and the trutti-frutti hat. Another highlight is Faye's polka-dot number, which closes the movie, another eye-popping showcase courtesy of Busby.I can't help feeling they could have picked a more charismatic actor for the lead other than James Ellison, and there are few things I could nit-pick about, but this is a musical which does defy believability anyway. He and Alice's romance did seem a bit rushed and forced near the beginning. Costarring Eugene Palette, Charlotte Greenwood and Edward Everett Horton, this is one upbeat film that you shouldn't think about too much and just enjoy. Oh, yeah, what about the plot, who cares?

I always loved this flick as a kid, and as a teenager in the 70's assisted with the creation of a Busby Berkley cult club at high school. This is the grand-daddy of the gloriously crazy wartime divertissement, if you will. It is also regarded by many film historians to be Berkley's pinnacle-piece, and most exemplifies his uniquely surreal imagination.It has been a long wait to DVD - and while they have "remastered" and cleaned up the dust and noise from the original print - I am disappointed in the reduction of Technicolor saturation which in my mind, is one of this pictures' most important attributes. The intense, almost garish 40's postcard-colour density is completely intentional. Unfortunately, it has been discarded for more tonal realism. Some less patriotic 21st century technophile on the studio computer has been a little over-zealous in trying to create a colour palette that is more naturalistic...a bad, bad idea and this is NOT what the maker had intended for his first Technicolor feature(!)You can see a few snippets of the original colour saturation to compare in the special features section. The only thing to do is jack up your colour correction to 100% if you wish to come near the original. But even that is not enough on today's plasma televisions. Now, if they could only do something for the mono-sound quality. J. C. Carnovale