christopher-underwood
The colour rendition is wonderful (at least on my Blu-ray copy) and the film looks incredible throughout. There is barely a pause and we go from one musical number to another (well, sometimes back to the same number) with for example coloured fountains spurting up to close one scene and move to another. I had hoped for more of the extravagant and surreal Busby Berkeley routines but the two we get are amazing and, as they say, worth the ticket price. There are more modest dances that work well and Benny Goodman is always on hand to keep things moving well. I don't share the enthusiasm of some for the antics of high kicker Charlotte Greenwood and partner in crime, Edward Horton and I was very underwhelmed with the leading duo of Alice Faye and James Ellison. Ellison would later appear in I Walked With a Zombie which was probably more appropriate and maybe Faye had sung better in her early years. Still worth it for the technicolour extravaganzas and a glorious performance from Carmen Miranda.
Steve Bailey
I'll get to the plot of Busby Berkeley's "The Gang's All Here" in a minute, because the plot isn't the most memorable part of this movie. The most memorable part is the bananas.About 20 minutes into the movie, a towering hat of Technicolor fruit appears on the screen, followed by its owner--'40s "Brazilian bombshell" Carmen Miranda. She proceeds to do a number called "The Lady in the Tutti-Frutti Hat," accompanied by chorus girls who bear bananas. Six-foot-tall bananas that continuously droop and sprout until number's end, when the chorus girls, worn out by the burden of this mutated fruit, lay down for a long siesta on a stage dressed up like an island.There's a reason this number occurs so early on: It takes you the rest of the movie to convince yourself you actually saw this in a 1943 movie.But then, this is from Busby Berkeley, a director who staged his musical numbers as though he was declaring war. And next to kitsch, war is pretty much the motivator here.The wafer-thin story involves Andy (James Ellison), a soldier who woos and wins Edie (Alice Faye), a canteen dancer, the night before Andy goes off to World War Two. In what seems an instant, Andy gets decorated and returned home to a victory party thrown by the family of Andy's childhood sweetheart and fiancée--who, unfortunately for Edie, is not Edie.Will the heartbreak be resolved? Do you really care? The plot is mostly an excuse for some snappy repartee between major '40s stars (in particular, Eugene Palette and Edward Everett Horton are hilarious), and the kind of musical numbers that seem to drop out of thin air. (In a couple of scenes, Benny Goodman and his orchestra stroll by and do some songs just for the heck of it.) "The Gang's All Here" is really a 1943 time capsule, but an eye-popping rouser of one. They don't make 'em like this anymore. They didn't make 'em much like this back then, either.
runamokprods
Yes, it's utterly absurd, and arguably stupid, but this made me laugh out loud a number of times, smile a lot of others,, and left my mouth hanging open with 'how did he do that'? camera moves, and 'did he just do that?!?' visual moments. Berkley adds color to his extravaganza dance numbers wonderfully, and even the tiny plot is handled with more fun than most of his earlier films. Carmen Miranda is terrific, as is Edward Horton, and the musical numbers are so over-the-top, and borderline obscene at times and flat out surreal at others that they're worth any moment of creaky dialogue. And for me, there were a lot fewer of those creaky moments than in Berkley's films from the 30s.
cxcxc
I always loved this flick as a kid, and as a teenager in the 70's assisted with the creation of a Busby Berkley cult club at high school. This is the grand-daddy of the gloriously crazy wartime divertissement, if you will. It is also regarded by many film historians to be Berkley's pinnacle-piece, and most exemplifies his uniquely surreal imagination.It has been a long wait to DVD - and while they have "remastered" and cleaned up the dust and noise from the original print - I am disappointed in the reduction of Technicolor saturation which in my mind, is one of this pictures' most important attributes. The intense, almost garish 40's postcard-colour density is completely intentional. Unfortunately, it has been discarded for more tonal realism. Some less patriotic 21st century technophile on the studio computer has been a little over-zealous in trying to create a colour palette that is more naturalistic...a bad, bad idea and this is NOT what the maker had intended for his first Technicolor feature(!)You can see a few snippets of the original colour saturation to compare in the special features section. The only thing to do is jack up your colour correction to 100% if you wish to come near the original. But even that is not enough on today's plasma televisions. Now, if they could only do something for the mono-sound quality. J. C. Carnovale
AD
