Advertised by Warners as Gold Diggers for '34, it's another film in that backstage cycle that traces the efforts of youth restless with creativity to seduce with love cynical hearts hardened by money and rigid morals. It is again a film about the makings of a show, the show we're meant to be watching.
So very much in line with Gold Diggers '33 and Footlight Parade, except a little less wondrous this time, a little less seductive in all the circumstances surrounding the stage, the burlesque of trials and tribulations in fighting to stage a vision.
But it is again Busby Berkeley who is staging the vision that we have come to see. So once more an astonishing panorama of Hollywood dazzle, but with all the frill and gaudiness of the musical working beneath the dazzle to address the circumstances of its making; so we have a number where a woman romances empty shirts on a hangwire but which are animated by invisible strings from above, implying the fates that seem to be in control, another number with the author of the whole thing singing about the face that inspired the vision with the ardor of love, and the final number addressing us from our position as viewers. Of course we have come to be seduced by the dames, nothing else mattered.
The show is so intoxicating that those cynical hearts watching from the balcony are completely soused by the end of it!
So what was from the outset seemingly controlled by the fates, by a woman chancing to sleep on the wrong bed in a train compartment, is gradually revealed to have been shaped all this time around a center with clearly reflected purpose; the author's effort to announce his passion for music and this woman he sings about, and so approach within his art the face behind the cardboard image of social appearances, as the middle number reveals.
As with the other films in this cycle, even if a little less accomplished, it is overall more than potent stuff on the ardor of a loving heart to transform anxieties of a chaotic modern life that we also know into a pattern that seduces love out of both participants and viewers.
It is enjoyable to watch, brisk with dance, the disposition dreamy, but with the small hint of a shadow at the heart of this dream. The choreography maps to the contours of that internal heart wishing to beat truthfully.
