This may be the definitive Busby Berkeley-choreographed musical simply because the entire movie revels in the sort of things that Berkeley’s elaborate dance numbers revel in: innuendo, flirtations and flesh. The movie chronicles the backstage romances and betrayals of a major Broadway production, but the faceless formations of the finale are what give the proceedings a real jolt. The camera glides through an endless canopy of legs for a few moments, then in a single cut leaps high above the stage, where the action below unfolds in dizzying, kaleidoscopic arrays. That all of this involves barely clad women seems to have been lost on Hollywood’s Hays Code enforcers, who apparently preferred to think of such dance numbers as art. They were right, of course, even if Berkeley’s visions are as lascivious as art can get.
