the leading man is my tpye

This Movie Can Only Be Described With One Word.

Excellent characters with emotional depth. My wife, daughter and granddaughter all enjoyed it...and me, too! Very good movie! You won't be disappointed.

There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.

As in Berkeley's earlier (and weaker) 'Dames', a pretty silly one-note plot is balanced by some amazing camera work and visual story telling in the musical numbers. At least the story we have to put up with to get to the dancing is a bit less annoying, and the acting a bit better. Adolph Monjou is fun as a con-man, Dick Powell is a bit toned down and less annoyingly 'gee-whiz' as our hero and Hugh Herbert is a bit more fun as 'the rich buffoon' than Guy Kibbie in the earlier film.And I will admit to sitting there, mouth open, saying 'how did he get those huge old cameras to do that?!?' And the huge, complex, dance number 'Lullaby of Broadway', often considered Berkley's greatest, is oddly, wonderfully dark in its implications. A whole story told in dance unto itself.

This is the story of extravagantly rich people, mostly fools, on vacation at an upscale resort in New Hampshire who put on a show for "the milk fund." There are enough problems to make you tear your hair out. Mrs. Prentice's dividend has been reduced from sixty cents to only forty cents on her six million shares. And this is 1935.It's pretty silly, although it has some decent built-in amusement. Sometimes it's strident. People shout at one another, arguing over who gets one third of the half of the fourth third's insurance that they are conning out of poor Mrs. Prentice.Dick Powell, Warner's resident juvenile crooner, gets to sing three songs (by Al Dubin and Harry Warren) to Gloria Stuart, the most nearly memorable being the climactic "Lullaby of Broadway".It's pleasant-enough nonsense and Busby Berkeley's direction moves forward with the speed of an express but, to tell the truth, it's not really vulgar enough for my taste. True, there is the "Song of Love" number with a thousand blonds dressed in white gowns seated at a thousand white grand pianos, and the pianos (and the girls) begin to move sinuously and form sine curves and double helices and whatnot. And, pretty soon, the girls stand up and swirl slowly around, flouncing their flounces, while the thousand pianos began to do a slow ensemble routine by themselves. Now -- I'll bet you didn't know that a couple of dozen pianos, in grand piano shape, curved where they should be curved, when fitted properly together will form a perfect square on which a young lady can dance. You did? I didn't.The "Lullaby of Broadway" number, it can be said, is at least a bit less decorous. More dancers are involved -- men and women both -- and they pound the floor with greater energy. Not satisfied with a full brigade of dancers seen from balcony height, Berkeley shows us a pair of shoes from BELOW, slamming and scooping on a transparent floor. That's nice. At least in one shot, when the dancers thump in rhythm, you can actually see the floor beneath resonate slightly, which is why no Army commander will march his unit across a bridge in anything but what's called "route step." I just threw that in for the heck of it.But I didn't see any overhead shots of a thousand scantily dressed girls unfolding into flowers or forming a pattern resembling the face of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And nothing from underwater, nothing that even approaches the obscene. A grave disappointment.Still, it's distracting, and you get to identify with people in evening dress who complain about the character of the vintage champagne.

I have seen descriptions and the videos of the only part of this movie that is apparently on UTube, namely the Lullaby of Broadway and I have to scream WTF!? The Lullaby of Broadway is this huge and lighthearted number involving the male lead apparently on a date with this beautiful woman and they watch this big number being done for them.Then at the end, at the height of all the frivolity the woman is knocked off the balcony and FALLS TO HER DEATH ON THE STREET MANY STORIES BELOW!!! What is going on here? As near as I can tell, this death isn't necessary for any plot point (I haven't seen the movie itself, since it's probably pretty boring except for the musical numbers.) and it appears the actress involved doesn't appear anywhere else in the movie. It's like Gene Kelly ending his "Singing in the Rain" number by having the old man who takes his umbrella get fatally run over by a truck. It's worse since people presumably identify with the apparently happy couple. It's more like Debbie Reynolds getting killed by lightning when she runs out to join Gene.What was Busby Berkeley thinking? Huh?

Gold Diggers of 1935 (1935) ** 1/2 (out of 4) Boy (Dick Powell) meets girl (Gloria Stuart) story is the backdrop of big musical numbers in this Busby Berkeley directed film. The two leads are wonderful and have some great chemistry and even a couple of the musical numbers are good but these come at the very end. The story is just so underwritten that it's hard to find much entertainment out of this thing. The film isn't really bad but it's not really good either. We've got better romantic comedies from this period and better musicals from this period so this is only recommended for fans of the stars.