Going Bananas!

Carmen Miranda and chorus girls performing “The Lady in the Tutti Frutti Hat” from THE GANG’S ALL HERE (1943), directed by Busby Berkeley.

In the early 1970s midnight movies became a craze after the Elgin Theatre in New York discovered a surprise hit with Alejandro Jodorowsky’s El Topo (1970). Soon other theatres across the country launched their own midnight film series and movies like Night of the Living Dead (1968), Pink Flamingos (1972), The Harder They Come (1972) and Harold and Maude (1972) began to attract audiences that missed those movies during their limited initial release. Some of those early midnight movie choices were surprising and included Hollywood classics like Walt Disney’s Fantasia (1940), the rock ‘n’ roll satire The Girl Can’t Help It (1956) and the WW2 era musical The Gang’s All Here (1943). Yet, when you consider the fact that a lot of those early midnight movie screenings were attended by younger audiences, many high on pot or other substances, it starts to make sense. The Gang’s All Here, in particular, with its eye-popping dayglo Technicolor hues, surreal art direction and outlandish dance choreography is as psychedelic and mind-blowing as the “trip sequence” in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).

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Lock Up Your Valuables!

Anyone who is familiar with Bollywood cinema knows that every film that is churned out by the Bollywood film industry contains musical numbers. That doesn’t mean they are all classified as musicals. Quite the contrary. Almost every film genre you can imagine exists in the Bollywood universe – romantic dramas, historical epics, action-adventure yarns, spy comedies, soap operas, even horror films – and they all have musical interludes that relate to the plot. Jewel Thief, one of the biggest Bollywood hits of 1967, falls under the category of crime caper but this is not a gritty noir like Rififi (1955) or The Asphalt Jungle (1950). Instead, it is a noir-lite delight that is closer in tone to the more comic heist classics like Topkapi (1964) or romantic suspensers like To Catch a Thief (1955). What sets it apart from all of the above movies are the stylish and elaborately choreographed dance/song numbers.

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