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The joke on censorship has Ezra Ounce the moneyed reformer (Hugh Herbert) checking the family tree for bad fruit, amid the branches is the Broadway hopeful (Dick Powell) in love with his cousin (Ruby Keeler). "How's that for background, sweetheart?" The revue ("Sweet and Hot") needs a backer, the burlesque star (Joan Blondell) solves the problem by simply turning up in the boudoir of the sausage magnate (Guy Kibbee), just a wholesome case of extortion. Frisky troupers on one side, on the other the Foundation for the Elevation of American Morals embodied by Herbert's hiccup, Kibbee's whine and ZaSu Pitts' groan. Show time: "Are your loins girded for the battle?" All preamble for a trio of numbers that are the quintessence of Busby Berkeley's carnal geometry. "The Girl at the Ironing Board" has Blondell as a fin de siècle laundress in a whirl of washboards and clotheslines, John Singer Sargent revised by Mae West and capped with a pile of anthropomorphic long johns. "And when I'm off on Sundays, I miss all these undies..." "I Only Have Eyes for You" multiplies Keeler into infinity, a cramped subway suddenly deserted balloons the reverie out of Metropolis. (Russell in Tommy offers a feverish memory of these cardboard peepers and masks.) Finally, "Dames" lays bare the feminine spectacle, "your knees in action, that's the attraction." Clocks into beds into bathtubs into vanity tables into stage doors, the morning routine of chorines who come to the studio so the upside-down camera can track between their legs. Back in the audience, prudes get sloshed on medicine while juveniles whisper in each other's ears, one last hurrah for raciness in the year of the Hays Code. With Arthur Vinton, Phil Regan, Arthur Aylesworth, Leila Bennett, and Berton Churchill. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |