It would be easy to criticize Gold Diggers of 1933's "Remember My Forgotten Man" from a contemporary viewpoint: it's a bit jarring when Joan Blondell declares that every woman's "got to have a man", the curtain cuts are a bit off, and the marching silhouettes don't quite line up at the climax. But it still gives me chills.
It strikes me that we rarely hear about the First World War, as the focus has been shifted almost exclusively to the hyperbolic horrors of the Second, rife with Nazis, Auschwitz and Pearl Harbour. The 1920s have been reduced to little more than romantic visions of gangsters, the Charleston and boozehounds. The Depression is a dusty visual metaphor of food lines. M. Kieth Booker and Frederic Jameson's versions of the 'death of history' are highlighted when viewing this number, as it depicts a historical relic that we have morphed into an alternate edit, or indeed forgotten. Our veterans are Private Ryans or Oliver Stoned, WWI is merely an event that led to WWII in our high school history books, and the waves of feminism in the later half of the 20th century make a statement such as Blondell's cringe-worthy. But if we are in a period that lacks a proper culture and chronology of history, we must task ourselves to be in a 1933's audiences 'shoes'. The times were-a-changing, but the pathos that we see here is indeed heart-breaking; once glorious war heroes are now street urchins, and the women, taught to be good housewives, have been abandoned. The sequence is at once an auteurist spectacle of geometrical chaos, actors to be directed and patterned, yet it feels deeply human. It is universal, yet personal. The fact that the silhouettes don't line up quite right reminds us that the figure made anonymous by shadow and Berkeley is actually an actor who is having difficulty fitting into the grand scope of marching. He becomes a real person, not a pawn. And for a contemporary audience, he moves beyond a role of moving wallpaper; he becomes our double. What was going through his mind at the time? Was he trying to speed up to fix the spectacle, or did he even realize that he became out of sync? Did Bubsy Berkeley scold him afterwards, along with the other dancers, for not lining up perfectly?
Gold Diggers of 1933 breaks the illusion of the stage right from the get-go, when "We're in the Money" gets cut off by the financial reality of Depression-era theatre. The performances range from the self-reflexive to the downright transparent (compare Aline MacMahon to Ruby Keeler), and the tongue-in-cheek melodramatics are obvious for what they are, a necessity in Hollywood narrative. But for a film advertised as "The Biggest Show on Earth", it doesn't shy away from the realities just outside the darkened theatre. "Remember My Forgotten Man" sticks out in the song roster, combining harsh reality with its theatrics. Joan Blondell becomes an actress playing an actress playing the role of women she probably knew. The men who play the Forgotten Men may have been in a food line just the day before. There is no disguising here. It may be an escape, but it's not naïve or ignorant. We can thank Jack Warner and Darryl F. Zanuck for insisting that "Remember My Forgotten Man" end the film, rather than "Pettin' in the Park". The film could have ended on a purely fantastical note of sex and silliness. Instead, we follow the happy ending of all the gold diggers getting their men with a sombre shake of what's waiting outside the door. But that doesn't mean it can't be fantastic, too.
