It has become one of the most famous moments in American movies: the camera pulls back from a close-up of Carmen Miranda to reveal that flamboyant Brazilian entertainer flanked by two rows of gigantic deep-red strawberries. Miranda is wearing one of her famous "tutti-frutti" hats, bedecked with the bananas that were her trademark. As the camera continues to pull back for a full view, the hat is revealed to be only the base of a huge inverted pyramid of bright yellow Brobdingnagian fruit, growing to outrageously phallic dimensions as it appears to sprout out of Miranda's head - or rather, the fevered imagination of the film's director, Busby Berkeley.
The shot is from "The Gang's All Here," a lavish 20th Century Fox musical that opened on Dec. 25, 1943, at New York's equally extravagant Roxy Theater, and that can be seen again starting today at the Film Forum, where it has a one-week run in a rare three-strip Technicolor print.
At the time of its release, "The Gang's All Here" gathered a few good notices. ("It's colossal, it's stupendous, and one of the artiest productions ever made," Wanda Hale wrote in The Daily News.) But movies were disposable items in those days, and the film was soon forgotten, seen for years only in black-and-white prints on local television.
But in 1972, Eric Spilker, a 32-year-old film collector and critic for Variety and TV Guide, became curious to know what the picture would look like in its original Technicolor. So using his industry contacts, Mr. Spilker took an option on the film for rerelease and got permission to show Fox's studio print for a select New York audience.
"A friend of mine had some connections," Mr. Spilker recalled in a recent interview, "and so we got an A-list crowd. Andy Warhol, Bob Dylan, Better Midler and Sylvia Miles were there, and that really put it over." The screening was followed by a standing ovation, and a few weeks later, Mr. Spilker, with backing from the exhibitor Don Rugoff, opened "The Gang's All Here" at the Murray Hill Theater. It was a sensation, and went on to repeat its success at first-run theaters around the country.
"The 1972 reissue, which seems like a few years ago, is now older than the film was at the time," Mr. Spilker said. The early 70's were perhaps the most propitious time for a rerelease of Berkeley's manic masterwork, a moment when the drug culture was fueling interest in all kinds of brightly colored, swirling things. It was, as well, a time when camp was coming out of the gay underground, emerging as a mainstream commodity with phenomena like the "Batman" television show and the Glam Rock movement. And of course, just as in 1943, there was a war on, and escapism was a national necessity.
Still, it isn't necessary to be stoned, gay or depressed to enjoy "The Gang's All Here." The negligible plot, which somehow required four writers to concoct, centers on the efforts of Pvt. Andy Mason (the B-picture star James Ellison, briefly elevated to the A list because of wartime leading-man shortages) to romance the nightclub chorus girl Edie Allen (Alice Faye, Fox's smoky-voiced top musical star) without allowing her to discover that he's actually the privileged son of a Wall Street tycoon (Eugene Pallette). The entire cast of the nightclub review, including the frequently imitated yet eternally inimitable Miranda, shows up at the tycoon's Westchester estate, ostensibly to put on a bond drive but really to get the lovers together.
The story may be trivial fluff, but for Berkeley, one of the oddest and most original talents to work in Hollywood, every movie is about the creation of a universe - his own. Using purely mechanical means, he constructed a free-floating dream world, where space can expand and contract at will (like those cramped nightclub stages that open up to the size of a football field); human figures arrange themselves into complex geometric patterns; and a constantly moving camera finds ever more bizarre and vertiginous angles on the action.
Without computer graphics to help him (as they did Robert Zemeckis in the beautiful Berkeley pastiche that is the climax of "The Polar Express"), Berkeley created all of his effects in front of the camera, using trick sets and lighting. (Though there is some memorable optical work at the end of "The Gang's All Here," when the heads of the principal players go whirling through space attached to giant polka-dots.)
The most abstract graphic notions - like a dance of glowing rings that might have come out of Disney's "Fantasia" - are played out in wholly realist turns. If you look closely, you can see that the rings of color are actually neon hula-hoops, each manipulated by a black-suited dancer.
It may be exactly that collision of the real and the unreal that gave Berkeley's work its timeless appeal. Frequently, he underlined the contrast, as when he pulled his camera back from some particularly vast and elaborate piece of choreography to reveal the tiny stage on which the action was supposedly taking place. Far from trying to cover up the disparity, Berkeley seemed to celebrate it. He defied the audience to suspend disbelief and enter into a dream world of his own mad devising.
By 1943, as Mr. Spilker pointed out, Berkeley was already considered in decline. His glory years at Warner Brothers, where he staged the production numbers for the studio's best-known early Depression musicals (including "42nd Street," "Footlight Parade" and "Gold Diggers of 1933"), were behind him, and he was laboring at the most conservative of the major studios, MGM, on vehicles for Judy Garland and Gene Kelly. Styles had changed, and Berkeley's epic creations had been replaced by a more intimate approach to the musical, based on individuals rather than armies of dancing extras.
But when Fox borrowed him for "The Gang's All Here," he was more than ready to rise to the occasion. The film would be his first production in three-strip Technicolor, and he made the most of that now obsolete but strikingly beautiful process. Unlike the color processes of today, which strip away layers of color already printed on the film, three-strip was an additive process, more like lithography than photography. Using a prism, a special camera recorded the yellow, cyan and magenta tones on three different strips of film, which were then printed one on top of another to create colors that were bright, sharp, subtly graded and extremely long-lasting. Unfortunately, the process was expensive, compared with the cheaper "subtractive" methods being developed by Kodak, and, Mr. Spilker said, the last three-strip Technicolor film, "Foxfire," was released in 1955.
Technicolor continued to make "dye transfer" prints (as the lithographic printing process was called) until the mid-1970's, though they were based on Kodak negatives. Entering the field just under the wire, Mr. Spilker ordered his print run from Technicolor in the dye-transfer process, which yielded colors of an intensity and solidity that few filmgoers of the 70's had experienced.
Even fewer have experienced that kind of color today, now that Technicolor has discontinued its dye-transfer process. (The last such release was "The Godfather, Part 2" in 1974.) Although most of Mr. Spilker's prints from the 70's have succumbed to years of overuse, the good news is that he had put two aside, aware that the process's days were numbered.
One of those prints, he said, never leaves his vault. The other is the one being shown this week at Film Forum, and a revelation it is. Though the copy shows signs of projector wear, its hues haven't faded a bit. At the moment, there is no better way to see this infinitely delightful, effortlessly inventive film, which has never been released to home video in any form. It is something to behold.