Pearl Jam Twenty (Cameron Crowe, 2011)

Pearl Jam Twenty is fan service done right. Armed with such an avalanche of archival footage that one wonders if someone hadn't been filming every second of each band member since their births, Cameron Crowe tosses in his own interviews and current-day concert video to make a package sure to please anyone with a decent familiarity with the band. Then again, maybe it's not so surprising that Crowe had access to mountains of material considering how quickly Pearl Jam rose out of the tragic ashes of Mother Love Bone to superstardom.

That stardom serves as the film's crux, the issue plaguing a band that wanted to reach all of their fans but knew that doing so meant acquiescing to a system they hated, especially Eddie Vedder. The most revealing yet, in retrospect, most fitting revelation Crowe digs up about the group is how Vedder, initially so shy on-stage, found his confidence when he saw security roughing up some drunk during a show. That brought out the dormant beast in him, and one can see the impetus for the band's shift from the early, insular songs of depression and anomie to the later works of sociopolitical directness. It also brought out his activism for everything from Tibetan freedom to Ticketmaster's price-gouging, and for a band so often derided for selling out grunge (as if that whole movement hadn't been co-opted almost immediately), Pearl Jam shows a disdain for fame so vicious it's a wonder they only briefly flagged in popularity in a 20-year career.

Crowe lays down information quickly, lingering on the death of Andrew Wood, lead singer of Mother Love Bone, just long enough to pay respects before launching into the meteoric rise of Pearl Jam. As the bandmates say, once they called in Vedder, then a security guard, based on an audition tape he sent them, the new group was playing shows by the end of the week. Their first album, Ten, exploded, and the rest was history.

Where the film takes its time is in its breakdown of the various elements that shaped the band's sound and progression. Vedder climbing on top of ceilings and lighting rigs as if looking for a place to hide from fame gives way to the idealistic fight against Ticketmaster gives way to playing for causes national and international. And while Crowe arrives at Ten with rapid speed, he also brings out the emotions that shaped its lyrics and sound. Vedder speaks of learning that his real father died before getting to meet him and getting out that pain in songs like "Alive" (which directly addresses the pain) and the gorgeous, droning cry "Release." Even the meatier remix given to the album's 2009 re-release cannot disguise how much of Ten sounds ready-made for an arena, but these songs also feel painful and intimate, and Crowe brings out why that is.

I don't know that Pearl Jam Twenty will offer up any new insights for the die-hards. As I watched it on VOD, I texted a friend of mine who is the biggest PJ fan I know, and I was amused that she would text back info on, say, Mike McCready's drug addiction in the '90s right before the film broached the topic. And considering how many fine albums the group has put out, front-loading most of the keen album analysis into Ten denies similar exegeses of great records like Vitalogy and their 2006 self-titled album that marked a creative resurgence for the band.

Furthermore, Crowe's collage of archival footage, modern-day interviews and the routine use of outside material for effect (i.e. reflecting the band's views on being put on a mainstream magazine cover like TIME's via Dylan's similar thoughts as expressed in Don't Look Back) grows somewhat tiring by the end, even if the slight peevishness of his juxtapositions is often amusing. Nevertheless, a sentimental chap like him understands the appeal of optimism in the often bleak world of fame, and if the band defines itself by skirting commercialism where possible and sticking by their principles, Crowe finds a goldmine in just how close they all are. A rivalry between Jeff Ament and Stone Gossard, to say nothing of Vedder's early attempts to confine the band's success out of fear of fame, has all melted away, leaving one of the few bands to navigate their way through alt.rock's tumultuous upheavals. Also heartwarming is Soundgarden's Chris Cornell, a close friend of the group's and someone who still cannot talk about Andy Wood without his eyes turning red with held-back tears.

So yes, like all other Cameron Crowe films, Pearl Jam Twenty is unfashionably optimistic, never dwelling on the handful of tragedies while still acknowledging them and their importance (obviously, the disaster at 2000's Rosklide Festival is given serious weight). It looks fondly upon a group that has occasionally flirted with thoughts of hanging it up, only to return stronger than ever. Even now, these men cannot believe where they've ended up. Near the end of the film, Vedder looks at the photos on his walls, pointing out all the musical icons he's met like Johnny Ramone and Joe Strummer, his voice not tinged with pride but lingering astonishment that these meetings really did occur. Finally he stops on a photo of Pete Townshend, his greatest hero, and remembers how nervous he was to meet the legendary guitarist and lyricist. "The first thing [Townshend] said was, 'I've waited so long to meet you,'" Vedder mumbles quietly, looking back at the camera sheepishly and humbly. So if Pearl Jam Twenty shows a group of middle-aged men far more comfortable with themselves than they were at the outset, it also shows them still aspiring to be worthy of their success. As their other big hero, Neil Young, would say, long may they run.

The Circle (Jafar Panahi, 2000)

The Circle may be the first prison escape movie to feature people who are all already out of jail. Its shifting narrative, which routinely hands off the baton to a new character and a new situation, revolves around women, most of whom have been to prison for something. What any of them did is never clear, and as we see throughout the movie, they might not know either as so many cops regularly detain someone without explanation. As such, while "The Circle" certainly refers to the circumnavigating arc the overall story takes, it also suggests a vague boundary that its characters cannot cross, a set of rules that constrains half of Iran's population solely on the basis of gender.

Unlike other Panahi films, The Circle does not show the defiance of the Iranian people to the authorities that still exercise total control over them. People stopped by cops in Crimson Gold demanded to know the reason for this harassment, and Offside shows a clear confrontation of insane theocratic law. Here, the director demonstrates the way Iranians are linked yet separated by the difficulties of harsh autocratic life, every character coming into contact with the other but isolated by the direction and the constant splitting up for safety's sake.

In each of the film's segments, Panahi's camera finds one character and sticks with her, never drifting from her side even when companions walk away. After a brief opening in a hospital, Panahi readjusts to focus on three women fresh out of prison and looking to make their way home. One of them, Maedah, is almost immediately arrested for trying to pawn a gold chain to raise bus money, and Panahi's camera hides with the other two, Nargess and Arezou, as they duck behind cars and watch this outrage unfold. Even when "free," they can easily find themselves back in jail for nothing. Panahi roots his camera on Nargess as this vignette continues, POV shots looking after Arezou as she calls in old favors to raise money and reverse shots revealing a nervous, vulnerable Nargess anticipating a cop pulling her aside at any moment. It hangs an overwhelming cloud of fear over the film, one that only grows as Panahi progresses with increasingly desperate characters.

It is accurate but misleading to say that The Circle is about state oppression of women in Iran. Rather, it is about the way such oppressions dictate social life and how women have learned to live under this oppressive regime without ever getting used to it. Nargess, split up from Arezou, attempts to buy a bus ticket to get home but has no ID as it's been taken from her. Without something to prove she's a student, she cannot ride alone without a man. Nargess finally convinces the guy at the counter to give her a ticket, but when she gets to the bus, she sees it being searched by police and flees, afraid of being sent to jail again. Nargess' friend, Pari, escaped from jail in the hopes of securing an abortion, and Fereshteh Sadre Orafaiy wears a look of crippling terror on her face as she tries to broach the subject with those who might help her, as if expecting even her woman friends to stone her. She knows what a pariah she is, but she still can't resign herself to her fate. The defiance of later Panahi films may not be here, but that unwillingness to fully give in can be seen even in the fearful ducking and hiding the characters do as they ultimately even give the camera the slip to avoid attention.

Yet Panahi finds moments of humor in this noxious cloud of oppression. He even begins the film playing around a bit with his anchored direction: opening on a black screen as we hear the escalating moans and screams of a woman in childbirth, Panahi suggests that the first perspective might be that of the baby she delivers, especially as the screen turns to blinding white when we hear the infant's first cries. But then we see the image coalesce into a static view of a door that is clearly not the child's POV, especially as the baby is in the room beyond. Panahi also incorporates circular movement into his camerawork, traversing spiral staircases and, in the memorable scene where Pari comes to Elham for help, moves around the room as Elham keeps nervously darting out of her friend's reach as if afraid of being seen in contact with her.

But that humor is flecked with sadness, and the sheer number of ways Iranian society is aligned against women leads one past disgust straight to despair. And the government isn't the only force at play here; in that childbirth opening, we see the mother of the woman who just gave birth asking the nurse about the child's sex. When the nurse happily says it's a girl, the old woman immediately frets that ultrasounds said the child would be a boy, and the nurse's cheeriness fades as the woman worries that her daughter's in-laws will demand a divorce. Even socially, these people cannot win, and it cannot be coincidence that the door separating the maternity ward from the waiting room has a sliding metal plate over a window as if a jail cell door.

By the time the film enters its final stretch, the problems facing whomever is dominating attention has ballooned to reveal the fullest depths of the horrors facing women and the blatant hypocrisy of the system. A mother abandons her daughter on the streets in the vague hope that she'll be adopted by a family who can care for her. The woman sobs uncontrollably as she defends herself to an outraged Pari, and there's a horrible logic to her actions that show how much she really does care about her daughter. A prostitute gets arrested while her john gets let go because he's a man. In a way, this film is even more hopeless than Crimson Gold, a film that begins with the protagonist's suicide before flashing back. There is seemingly no safe haven for these characters, no way they can't be arrested or harangued for something. For me, the most telling moment came near the end as the prostitute is taken to jail and rides in a van along with some arrested men. The men begin singing over the protests and warnings of the police, and the prostitute even lights a cigarette after being chastised once. The only moment of expression and freedom in this entire movie takes place as characters ride to jail.

American: The Bill Hicks Story (Matt Harlock & Paul Thomas, 2011)

Bill Hicks existed and continues to live on at the fringes of mainstream acceptance, to the point that the titling of this biographical documentary seems less a insight into the comic's thematic focus than a reminder to the citizens of his home country that he was actually one of them. You wouldn't have known it during his life, and few seem to know it now; it's fitting that this film, title and all, was made by two filmmakers from Britain, where Hicks arrived an instant megastar in 1991, barely three years before his death from pancreatic cancer. But he died a legend in some circles, a mythical entity of uncompromising truth and savage comedy that has only expanded with time. In the aftermath of George W. Bush, so many fans have projected upon what Hicks would have had to say about that period in time that Hicks himself likely could never have lived up to the expectation had he beaten his cancer.

That places a weight on the shoulders of American that the film could never bear. As hagiography, it won't convert anyone unfamiliar with Hicks, and the fans will know almost all of the footage the directors collected by heart. Once the film establishes how Hicks grew into the comic who emerged in the late-'80s like the wrath of God come to pass judgment on Reagan's America, it ceases to offer insights, reveling in the skill of this brutal, hilarious man—"comedian" seems less accurate than the phrase, to steal from Mel Brooks, "stand-up philosopher"—with a sort of greatest-hits package.

Taking stylistic cues from the film adaptation of Robert Evans' memoir The Kid Stays in the Picture, American makes up for sparse footage of Bill's early life by animated photographs that give three dimensional movement to still images. Digital collages match talking head reminiscences not only with settings but by cutting various facial expressions from old photos to reflect the tenor of remembered conversations, breakthroughs, and struggles. Intriguing and striking as this style is, it cannot hide its purpose: to make up for massive gaps in usable material to show from the first 25 years or so of Hicks' life.

Still, for a time this does not matter. The lack of video material from Hicks' childhood is to be expected, and the portrait his friends and family paint of an angry but inspired kid helps contextualize the comic's stage persona. The filmmakers craft a vision of a boy so reserved and defensive of his abilities that he never learned how fine his parents were with his abrasive style until well into his adulthood, a kid who bonded with friends and planned whole careers with them behind his locked bedroom door. This secretive, caustic young man aligns eerily with the destructive social commentator later seen screaming and rolling around on-stage, and photos of a teenage Hicks are instantly recognizable as him, but then they would be for a man who never got to grow old.

My favorite stretch of the documentary charted the first stage of Hicks' comic career. I was surprised to find that not only did he start out as a clean comic—fans of his will know how baffling the very notion of this is—but that he nearly enjoyed mainstream success out of the gate. Tapes of early material overflow with jokes about typical youth subjects like parents, but you can hear Hicks' incredible grasp of flow and rhythm early on, talents that would serve him well later when he learned to spin lengthy diatribes that only occasionally floated into a punchline yet kill with their precision and pacing. Obviously he's still an average comedian at this stage, but it reveals something about the nature of the system he later railed against that he nearly broke out with this safer material before substance abuse shaped the angrier performer who would live on in infamy. As is so often the case with artists, drugs and alcohol helped unlock Bill's talent (loosening his more uptight persona into the bitter, honest ranter he became), then sidelined his career, then provided an even bigger inspirational boost when he got clean. This is a clichéd tale of artistic growth, but clichés can be true, as they obviously are here.

Once it sets into Hicks' rebirth into the firebrand known and revered by pockets of fans today, American treads water in its final hour, half-heartedly attempting to keep providing personal insight but largely ceding to the performance footage, most of which has already surfaced as complete concert vids to sate voracious fans looking for any spare drop of the man when he left behind but a few albums. It's all stuff we've seen, and even those close to him approach the material as if fans, discussing how surprised they were he exploded in the UK and Ireland and bemoaning his controversial final appearance on Letterman, where his whole act was cut by fretful producers.

Perhaps the greatest revelation American has to offer is just how intangible and symbolic Hicks has become, even to those who grew up with him. When the film reaches that point of no return for Hicks' cult of personality, even his parents speak of their son in a generalized way that caters to his public memory instead of his private one. Only the pained perspectives of friends belatedly told of his cancer offer any unique angle on the final years of Hicks' life, but otherwise people speak of Bill Hicks the Iconoclast instead of Bill Hicks the friend and son. It's amazing to see that, for a man who will almost certainly never be anything more than a minor cult icon, Bill Hicks can command such awe that even a collection of clips everyone familiar with Hicks will recognize are presented as the Gospel scrolls. But if Hicks now exists as a cult deity, then American serves no real purpose, and its fleeting moments of new information cannot disguise how empty this exercise in hero worship is. It's not that I don't understand the appeal of Hicks—I'm one of those people who has fever dream fantasies of him ripping the early 21st century to shreds. But as much as I appreciate someone caring enough for Hicks to make him the subject of a biography, the nature of his legacy is such that any film on him will feel at once belabored and overdone yet incomplete and narrow. Still, if life is just a ride, as Hicks used to say, American isn't the worst way to use one or two tickets.

Moneyball (Bennett Miller, 2011)

"It's hard not to be romantic about baseball," Oakland As GM Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) sighs near the end of Moneyball. Clearly we've never chatted. Based on the bestseller that revolutionized America's pastime, Moneyball deals with the As' 2002 season and how Beane, along with a handful of statistical whizzes, evened the playing field by taking a team they barely scraped together with a paltry budget and broke the record for most consecutive wins in a season. It is also a film that captures the spirit of baseball as I see it, meaning that it is arduously drawn-out and involves far more math than I ever want to do when eating junk food and becoming, in theory, emotionally invested in the grab-assing of 'roided-up men.

Moneyball opens with footage of the 2001 American League elimination game between the As and the New York Yankees, the richest team in baseball. Intertitles contrast the teams not by score or stats but budgets, positing baseball as a metaphor for class warfare that seems especially apt in the current economic climate. Still, it's hard to see the As as underdogs when 25 people split $40 million a year to play a game. So as director Bennett Miller is trying to make me shake my head at the unfairness of it all, I was already so uninterested that the one thing that drew my eye was how incredibly old TV footage from exactly one decade ago looks.

The problem with Moneyball is that it reads as if Aaron Sorkin just took The Social Network screenplay and used a find-and-replace to swap out "Facebook" for "baseball" without bothering to dramatize the backroom dealings of this new subject. In fact, had anyone else but Sorkin (along with co-writer Steve Zaillian) written this then Sorkin would be in court with that person right now suing for IP infringement. When Beane, desperate to put together a team after richer franchises gut him for his only capable players, starts using statistics to find the best players he can afford, he faces not one obsolete Eduardo Saverin but a sea of naysayers. Zuckerberg's Asbergian alienation becomes Beane's managing isularity. And the constant flashbacks to Billy's own youth of being courted by the big leagues takes every previously thin allusion to Citizen Kane and makes them so overt I kept craning my head around young Billy Beane to see if I could spot a sled in the background.

Pitt plays Beane with a detachment he wants to make sympathetic, but the character doesn't support the lionizing portrait he's given. Armed with Yale graduate Peter Brand (Jonah Hill, playing a composite of various people who worked with the GM), Beane made his team better by ruthlessly cutting and undermining people who understandably hated an approach that invalidated their entire professional lives. For all his talk of baseball's romanticism, Beane sure has little issue with dispensing with whatever humanity the sport has to focus solely on numbers. When he gives second chances to washed-up pitcher with a shot elbow (the always endearing Chris Pratt) or a fading star so old the Yankees actually pay the As to take him off their hands, he does so not as a show of giving neglected and undervalued players a chance but a cynical measuring of their affordable worth. And when this gambit pays off, Beane wastes no time wheeling and dealing to get better players with his newfound clout, forcing some of the injured and overlooked players to be traded or even sent to the minors to make room for more solid athletes. For a movie that places so much weight on the idea of Beane being the person to rejuvenate baseball and get it back to the spirit of the game instead of focusing all on money, it neglects to point out that "moneyball" refers to the kind of game he plays.

The film's strongest yet least utilized element concerns the war of wills between Beane and his team manager Art Howe (Philip Seymour Hoffman), who views Beane's strategy of betting on misfits and has-beens based on calculated strengths in esoteric fields like on-base averages as insanity and career suicide. Hoffman, with a shaved head and a mounting look of pure fear as Beane's gamble proves intially disastrous, brilliantly channels his put-upon loser skill into the coach, shaking his wristwatch in agitation as he walks away from an unsuccessful contract renegotiation and looking like a dethroned monarch when Beane trades his favorite players to prove a point. Though focusing more fully on this conflict might have reduced the story's more far-reaching implications to a two-man battle, Hoffman and Pitt are so compelling and vicious together that I wish the whole film had revolved around their petty power plays. I also greatly enjoyed Hill, who plays against his usual frantic type to be the collected, shyly nervous foil to Beane's brash behavior, routinely stealing scenes from Pitt's furrowed brow and arrogant confidence.

But so much about this film is not merely extraneous and "Hollywood" but depressingly predictable and occasionally troubling. Talking heads constantly overlap on the soundtrack to put the pressure on the team to succeed, and the baseball scenes occur in chiaroscuro abstraction, placing a batter or a pitcher against black voids and cutting out all the noise until it becomes a crutch and a gimmick. When the As prepare for their first game with a cloud of doubt over them, a local TV reporters comes and behaves in a manner that honestly makes me unable to describe her without using a highly offensive and sexist word. Local sports journalists conduct themselves with a thirst for hard-hitting answers roughly comparable to the people who cover awards show red carpets. For her to viciously hammer these players for not being good enough is a flight of fancy that only gives more ammo to those shooting down Sorkin's rep as a feminist. We also get a portrait of masculine weakness in the form of Beane's ex-wife's new hubby, who knows nothing about sports and even speaks in airy, effeminate voice.

Moneyball's syrupy, downbeat underdog ending uses all kinds of tricks to lure the audience into sentimental bliss, from exploiting the emotional pull of a child (a singing child, no less) to validating Beane while still positioning him as a humble victor. But the true tenor of the film's ending and what it means for baseball is not one of rebirth but "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss." The same was true of The Social Network, but there it was the somber punchline, not the victorious dénouement.

Record Club #6 Announcement: Agharta

For the past few months, a group of bloggers organized by the inestimable Ed Howard have discussed albums for a cross-site feature called the Record Club (entries organized by Ed here). Now it's my turn to pick the album of the month, and I've chosen one of my all-time favorites, the criminally underrated Agharta by Miles Davis. I can't wait to write about this album, and I'll hope you'll return October 24 to discuss it with me. If you're not a member of the Record Club, never fear: anyone and everyone is free to comment, and be sure to email either me or Ed if you need the, as they say, "required materials."

Also feel free to post the banner image at your own site. I'd greatly appreciate it.

<a href="http://armchairc.blogspot.com"><img src="http://i191.photobucket.com/albums/z43/sevenarts/music/recordclub6agharta.jpg"></a>

The Blue Angel (Josef von Sternberg, 1930)

What was it about the Germans that made their initial forays into talkies the high-water marks of the new format? If anything, the German film style to that point was the one best suited to silence, all Expressionistic imagery crafting endless depth out of jagged set design, shadowplay and graceful camera work. Josef von Sternberg's The Blue Angel contains many visual cues that tie it to the national cinema of the past—angular backdrops of villages, impossibly cramped apartments filled with minute detail—but his greatest coup is his incorporation of sound into the image in such a way as to enhance the atmosphere, adding another dimension to artistic control.

The director's exacting perfectionism turns the story of Immanuel Rath (Emil Jannings), an uptight teacher at a preparatory high school who gets lured by the seductions of Weimar Germany, into a stylistic smorgasbord of crisp, static imagery (this was early sound cinema after all) that from the first moment suggest a slight separation from reality that grows into a gulf as the film progresses. Jannings, portly and mannered, nevertheless betrays flashes of expressive acting early on that show a restlessness and a madness within him long before the head-spinning perfection of Marlene Dietrich's legs tilts him off his axis.

Jannings was a master of silent cinema, and he clearly respected von Sternberg so much that he reconciled with the director after the two had an intense falling-out over The Last Command. In a film filled with detailed sets that communicate social disarray (or, conversely, the lingering regimentation of the nation's youth in its schools), Jannings is the most dynamic element of the mise-en-scène, always adjusting his large frame to fit into the frame or to further emphasize his remove from everything else around him. His comical mustache, grown out to the point that it is not easily tamed, flaps with abandon and twitches with anticipation as Rath's grasp on decorum slips. After he follows his miscreant students into the Blue Angel nightclub and gets an eyeful of Lola Lola (Dietrich), that mustache is becomes the last thing Immanuel cannot control.

Who can blame him? Dietrich pops off the screen as Lola, her smile more blinding than the spotlight she shines on Immanuel when he first come into the Blue Angel. Despite her sultry presence, Dietrich also gives off a kindness that isn't a trap, even if it makes Immanuel so dizzy he ends up destroying himself. Seemingly anyone can wander backstage after her, and the other upstanding gentlemen of the community are so smitten with Lola that Rath, who frets about his reputation, receives only admiring from support from the people who see him with her. Jannings is the film's centerpiece, but it's no wonder von Sternberg teamed up with Dietrich again. You don't let your only film with a talent like that put her in a supporting role.

Jannings' well-modulated progression of insanity and unchecked desire aligns with von Sternberg's direction, which is also pristine and fussy but is just outside of realism from its opening scans over cutout village dwellings. Immanuel's apartment is a place of disarray, cluttered with books that look dust-covered with lack of use. The Blue Angel, like other nightclubs the film will show, is tiny and vaguely depressing but feels vast, as it contains the last vestiges of cheer, however ironic, in the impoverished postwar nation. The hall, though containing no more than a few dozen people, nevertheless looks cramped, and von Sternberg has the sound amped up to make a dingy dive sound like Madison Square Garden.

So effective is von Sternberg's use of audio throughout the film that, before even getting to the dialogue, von Sternberg has used diegetic sounds and music to create such a mood that the sound sounds more natural than other early users of the technology, even as the director uses it to artificial and artistic effect. Amusingly, von Sternberg finds ways to cut out the sound, whether by having Rath's songbird die in its cage at the start or by closing a window during a test so the sound of singing girls is instantly silenced in the room. This is a repeated device, sounds always being silenced entirely with a closed door, sealing off worlds from each other and giving off a sense of isolation that heightens the later blossoming of desire. Yet by creating patches of silence, von Sternberg suggests that the supposed gimmick really does make the experience more realistic, and he makes the silent portions the ones that feel odd and disconnected.

The Blue Angel proves a remarkably conservative film, tearing down a man through base lust until he's become a horrible perversion of himself. Yet, whether or not von Sternberg would acknowledge it, the arrogance Rath builds on a foundation of sand turns him into a personification of Weimar Germany, an entity proud of itself for nothing as it sinks further into squalor and vice. Even the cabaret tunes have an air of portent to them, lonely and morose even at their most drunkenly exuberant. It's telling that Rath, already tempted, completely falls for Dietrich when she sings a slow, sad song that takes the smoky seduction of nightclub cabaret and slows it to a crawl, like a music box winding down. (Von Sternberg only makes this connection clearer when he shows Rath waking up the next morning in Lola's bed and playing with a music box on her nightstand.) Rath's eventual mental collapse prefigures the madness that would sweep Hitler to power, an idea that Fritz Lang would flesh out more the following year with his own, far grittier look into Germany's sinful underbelly. The Blue Angel may not reach the same heights (lows?) as M, but it has held up just as well.

Gold Diggers of 1933 (Mervyn LeRoy, 1933)

Gold Diggers of 1933 bursts with such energy that it barely gets through its credits before Ginger Rogers enters in close-up singing a show tune. The number, choreographed by Busby Berkeley like the other three routines of the film, is massive, a grandiose paean to money that makes you forget the year in the title until creditors bust in at the song's climax to shut down the indebted production. The disconnect makes the intrusion of reality all the more amusing, more impressive considering how hard it is to top the comic highpoint of the gold-digger song "We're in the Money," complete with looming silver dollar setpieces and costumes of scantily clad showgirls wearing coins over their privates (as if announcing the toll for entry).

The creditors' blunt reminder of the world outside the theater, subsequently seen through the living conditions of the other three leads of the film: ingenue Polly (Ruby Keeler), torch singer Carol (Joan Blondell), and the sarcastic Trixie (Aline MacMahon). Forced to share an apartment, the three stoop to stealing neighbors' milk and have become so despondent over job searches that they've given up looking. And when their old producer, the irascible Hopkins, comes by with plans to make a production about the Depression, the fresh memory of his gaudy, glamorous oblivion suggests that such a show would capture the Great Depression with as much realism as Armageddon does astrophysics. Only the timely intervention of Polly's talented singer-songwriter (and mysteriously wealthy) boyfriend Brad secures Hopkins the money, exciting the girls but also raising suspicions.

When production issues force Brad on-stage, his true identity is soon discovered: he's no criminal but the heir to a fortune, forced to disguise himself because his family disapproves of his love of the theater. And sure enough, his brother Lawrence, who holds control of the estate, and the family lawyer, Fanuel "Fanny" Peabody, soon turn up looking to pay off Polly, whom they see as a gold digger, and bring Brad back home. But a case of mistaken identity leads Trixie and Carol to start wooing the two men, partly out of outrage at the way they insult Polly but also to rob them blind, genuinely taking on the role the fellas assigned to Polly without evidence. Fay (Rogers), the one so desperate to find a rich man, tries to barge in on this action, but Carol and Trixie make it clear that if she tries anything to steal one of these men away, she'll be able to use her own scalp as a stole.

Sharp dialogue and witty flirtation drives much of the film, with most of the comedy rooted in the constant bewilderment of Lawrence and Fanny as they find themselves flummoxed by the eyelash-batting temptresses before them. Carol and Trixie make such short work of the men that the two of them con the chaps into paying for outrageously expensive hats C.O.D. during their very first meeting. Lawrence and Fanny are instantly smitten but criticize the other for losing his head; William's proper but caustic declaration, "Peabody, you're disgusting" caught me so off-guard I laughed out loud.

But the real draw, of course, is the music. Though the film contains only four musical numbers, each is so impressive and visually distinct that the film needs to separate them to let the audience fully process the intricacy of the last sequence before seeing the next. Apart from the aforementioned gilded comedy of "We're in the Money" is the epic, slightly surreal and brazenly naughty "Pettin' in the Park," which clearly refers to the slang use for "petting" and doesn't even try to hide it in innuendo. The setpiece opens up the stage into impossible dimensions, dancing showgirls entering on roller skates by the dozen as a dwarf dressed as a baby hops out of a stroller and follows suit. A staged rainstorm soaks the women, who retreat into a two-story set as a cover goes up to mask them stripping down out of their clothes, but their silhouettes frankly reveal more than a PG-13 film could get away with today. When the curtain lifts, they wear metal clothing impervious to the lascivious grasps of the men who move around them, at least until Brad gets his hands on a can opener to cut Polly's outfit off her. The epic scale of the numbers made me forget this was a Pre-Code, but the overt sexuality on display here removes all doubt. I was also drawn to a patented Berkeley top shot of dancers holding giant, fake snowballs, their swaying white spheres reminding me of a dandelion about to release its spores. Even plant sex factors into this song!

"The Shadow Waltz" takes the mildly surreal touches of "Pettin' in the Park" to crazy new heights, setting the song against an inky black background as a handful of props and performers emerge with angelic light among the void. Eventually, the light drops out all together to leave a host of violins rigged with neon tubes to glow in the dark, undulating with amoebic sloshes before tightening into the usual Berkeley precision, even arranging into a giant violin at one point. What in the hell this has to do with the Great Depression is anyone's guess, but who on Earth cares?

Only the final song (placed at the end in lieu of "Pettin' in the Park" because Jack Warner and Darryl F. Zanuck were so impressed with it) truly gets at the Depression. But Berkeley and LeRoy make up for lost relevance by packing "Remember My Forgotten Man" with stirring choreography and brilliant cinematic technique to condense the effects of the Depression into a setpiece no less vast and astonishing than the other tunes but flecked with an emotional impact the others lack. Shots of soldiers returning home from WWI carrying their wounded and dead slowly morph into the Bonus Army March on Washington the previous year, while LeRoy cuts up the progression of performers walking through a bread line into rousing montage. Shot with Expressionistic lighting and vertical, vivid stage design, "Remember My Forgotten Man" culminates in a brilliant shot of soldiers' shadows hanging like ghosts in the background as Carole stands, the embodiment of hope in this dark time as the downtrodden below reach up to her like the groping paws clamoring for the robotic Maria in Fritz Lang's Metropolis.

Placed after the true conclusion of the plot, this sequence is perhaps out of step with the rest of the film's comic whimsy, but it's no wonder Warner and Zanuck rearranged the order to place it at the end: "Forgotten Man" shows off the best of the film's creative talents, and by shoving the coy flirtation of "Pettin' at the Park" further up in the movie,  the filmmakers make the climax the proof of the theatre's worth. Sure, it's an ostentatious sequence like all the rest, but there's truth and relevance to this work, and the entire scene is so inspiring that it somehow works better as escapist optimism by confronting the Depression head-on than the carnal distractions of the other tunes. It's a wild, exuberant end to a great film.