Underplayed Gems

The Gang's All Here (1943)

The Gang's All Here poster
Directed by
Busby Berkeley
Genre
musical film
Country
United States
Runtime
1h 43m
Rated
NR
Rating
5.9 of 10 from 41 voters
Elsewhere
IMDb
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How it feels

A musical comedy set during World War Two. A young woman falls for a soldier and follows him to New York. The film features elaborate musical numbers with fruit-themed costumes and plenty of silly jokes.

whimsicalplayfulcampycolorfulupbeatlivelyhumorousnostalgic

What happens

The Gang's All Here is a 1943 American Twentieth Century Fox Technicolor musical film starring Alice Faye, Carmen Miranda and James Ellison. The film, directed and choreographed by Busby Berkeley, is known for its use of musical numbers with fruit hats. Included among the 10 highest-grossing films of that year, it was at that time Fox's most expensive production. Musical highlights include Carmen Miranda performing an insinuating, witty version of "You Discover You're in New York" that lampoons fads, fashions, and wartime shortages of the time. The film features Miranda's "The Lady in the Tutti Frutti Hat" which, because of its sexual innuendo (dozens of scantily clad women handling very large bananas), apparently prevented the film from being shown in Brazil on its initial release. In the US, the censors dictated that the chorus girls must hold the bananas at the waist and not at the hip. Alice Faye sings "A Journey to a Star," "No Love, No Nothin'," and the surreal finale "The Polka-Dot Polka." The film was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Art Direction-Interior Decoration, Color (James Basevi, Joseph C. Wright, Thomas Little). It was the last musical Faye made as a Hollywood superstar. She was pregnant with her second daughter during filming. In 2014, The Gang's All Here was deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

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