Warner’s recent box “The Busby Berkeley Collection Volume Two” is a cornucopia of wisecracking, crooning, dancing, and racial diciness. I examine its particulars in a two-part series at The Auteurs’ Notebook, part one of which is up now.
Berkeley Buzz Be
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About halfway through “Bugle Call Rag” in THE BIG BROADCAST OF 1937, they simply give up cutting among band members and just leave the camera on Krupa. Which is as it should be.
I’m mildly annoyed they didn’t include Berkeley’s last Warner musical, “The Garden of the Moon.” It’s very minor stuff, true, but I’ve been obssessed with “The Girlfriend of the Whirling Dervish” since I heard it on a Warner 50th-anniversary album in ’73. I finally saw the movie a year ago on TCM, and the number is well, memorably bizarre, with Jerry Colonna(!) as the Dervish’s girlfriend.