Gold Diggers of 1935 (1935)

Gold Diggers of 1935 is an American comedy romance film first released in 1935, directed by Busby Berkeley.  The film stars Dick Powell, Adolphe Menjou, Gloria Stuart, Alice Brady and Hugh Herbert.  Our overall rating for this film is: very good.


The staff at the Wentworth Plaza, a high class hotel at Lake Waxapahachie, are used to handsome tips from their well-heeled clients.  The only guest who isn’t liberal with her gratuities is Mrs Prentiss, a wealthy widow who watches over every cent of her multi-million dollar fortune like a psychopathic lioness guarding her cubs.  When her daughter Ann insists on a last fling before marrying the boring tycoon T. Mosley Thorpe, Mrs Prentiss engages hotel desk clerk Dick Curtis as her personal escort, hoping that this will keep her expenditure to a minimum.  Unfortunately, the scheme backfires when Dick and Ann fall in love and decide to get married.  Meanwhile, Mrs Prentiss’s wayward son has fallen for Dick’s former fiancée.  The widow’s woes are exacerbated when she hires Nicolai Nicoleff, an extravagant and dishonest Russian theatre director, to take charge of the annual charity show which, grudgingly, she bankrolls each year.  Heedless of his sponsor’s penny-pinching proclamations, Nicoleff goes ahead and puts together the most lavish spectacle imaginable.  And as if this wasn’t enough, Mrs Prentiss has just learned she has incurred a one third cut in her dividend!   Still, her problems are as nothing compared with the travails of T. Mosley Thorpe, a world authority on snuff boxes who ends up being blackmailed by his gold-digging stenographer...

Warner Brothers’ spirited attempt to cash in on the success of their first two Gold Diggers films – Gold Diggers of 1929 and Gold Diggers of 1933 – is somewhat undermined by a ludicrously contrived plot which provides the flimsiest of frameworks for its lavish song and dance numbers.  However, so impressive are these numbers that the failings of the mangled vaudevillian storyline are easily forgiven and the spectator has no option but to be just swept along by the fun and ebullience of what the film has to offer – a pleasant distraction from the pains and worries of everyday life.  To a contemporary audience that had yet to see the back of the Great Depression, Gold Diggers of 1935 was a very welcome tonic.

Dick Powell, arguably the smoothest juvenile of his day, recaptures some of the magic of his previous Gold Diggers outing, ably assisted by the lovely Gloria Stuart, although both are too easily out-staged by Alice Brady who puts in a gloriously over-the-top turn as the tight-fisted widow Mrs Prentiss.  Without the lively contributions of Brady and other like-minded lunatics, such as Adolphe Menjou and Hugh Herbert, much of the comedy would have fallen decidedly flat.  The scripted jokes are not that funny but they are played out with such screwball-style enthusiasm that you would have to be a soulless block of granite not to succumb to the urge to laugh out loud at some of the more extravagant gags, such as the surreal, and ever so slightly sinister, sword dance rehearsal.

Gold Diggers of 1935 was the first film to be directed solo by Busby Berkeley, the legendary Hollywood dance choreographer who was renowned for his highly artistic and technically challenging dance routines.  It was Berkeley who masterminded the mind-blowing finale to the previous Gold Diggers film and here he surpasses himself with what is widely regarded as the greatest musical number committed to celluloid, an expressionistic Depression-themed dream sung to Lullaby of Broadway, the song that won the film its only Oscar.  This sequence is unlike anything you will find in any other Hollywood movie and perfectly evokes the era in which the film was made, with the Art Deco glamour of the showbiz world mingling with the grim economic realities of the mid 1930s.  The film offers one other notable spectacle – a stunning yet totally bonkers ballet performed by hundreds of pianos – but the haunting Lullaby of Broadway sequence is the one that makes the greatest impression and elevates a mediocre music hall farce to the status of an enduring classic.

© Alex Sullivan 2010

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