The Gang's All Here (1943)

Good , But It Is Overrated By Some

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

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?

For some reason I've never seen this movie on television though it's reasonable to assume it's been shown over the years so when it surfaced as part of an 8 Fox Musicals boxed set at a silly price (£30, which works out at £3.75 a throw) I snapped it up, especially since 1) it was selling elsewhere at £50 and 2) out of 8 titles I only owned one (Daddy Longlegs). You can't copyright a title, of course, and this was the third movie since 1939 (the second appeared in 1941) called The Gang's All Here and since the other two seem to have sunk without trace this is probably the most substantial. I doubt if anyone went to see this, either at the time or subsequently, looking for a solid plot; chances are they went to see Alice Faye who was just about to abdicate as 'Queen' of the Fox lot, and hear the score though in 1943 they wouldn't necessarily have been aware of Harry Warren and Leo Robin. What Faye did was warmth - as opposed to glamor laced with cynicism (Betty Grable, her immediate successor as 'Queen') or dumb (Marilyn Monroe, who succeeded Grable) - which is not to say she was chopped liver, in fact she was lovely rather than beautiful and the warmth embraced not only her personality but also her voice which she put to good use in her nine-year musical career at Fox during which time she introduced 23 'hits', in fact in the same year (1943) as The Gang's All Here she had already introduced another Harry Warren hit song, You'll Never Know in Hello, Frisco, Hello, a song which, of course, went on to win the Best Song Oscar. She supplemented 'Know' with two more fine ballads in this movie, A Journey To A Star and No Love, No Nothing and the score also included Paducah, Minnie's In The Money - a solo vocal for Benny Goodman? and two typical Busby Berkeley Production Numbers, Carmen Miranda's The Lady In The Tutti-Frutti Hat and Faye's Polka-Dot Polka in which everyone joined in as a grand finale. June Haver popped up as a hat-check girl and Jeanne Crain had one line but the support included - apart from Benny Goodman and his band - Charlotte Greenwood, Eugene Palette and Edward Everett Horton all of whom contributed to a pleasant diversion. Faye, who was pregnant at the time, made one more film two years later, it was a 'straight' role in Otto Preminger's Fallen Angel and in the wake of what she considered Darrell Zanuck's inept editing of what Faye herself considered a fine acting performance she retired from the screen resurfacing some twenty years later in the remake of State Fair. As swan songs go The Gang's All Here isn't bad at all.

Basically plot less, and a vehicle for some mind-boggling Busby Berkeley numbers ... those bananas!!! ... and two leading ladies at 20th Century Fox, Alice Faye and Carmen Miranda. Both ladies have strong personalities and buoy this film up. It needs it, as there is no story to speak of, the characterisations are slight, and even Benny Goodman stretches the goodwill a bit.Family rivalries, chequered pasts, wartime romances, and a show of shows, and you have 'The Gang's All Here' in a nutshell (or a banana skin).Berkeley chorus girls were of course known for partaking of outlandish formations and musical numbers shot from all angles including above, but those rising and falling bananas, and Carmen Miranda cavorting about covered in fruit ... absolutely preposterous!

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