The Gang's All Here
[...] Abandoning the then standard practice of recording a dance number with several cameras as it proceeded uninterrupted, <PERSON> restricted himself to single-camera setups for each shot and planned the precise sequence of the edited version in advance. But he counterbalanced this rigorous control over the content and sequence of shots with an extraordinary technical facility and imagination. His single camera went everywhere, gliding along tracks and monorails, settling low beneath floorboards and high on a crane, looming directly over chorines as they formed shifting, kaleidoscopic patterns. More a choreographer of the camera than of performances, <PERSON> imagined a space that could exist only in cinema and, given the resources of a Hollywood studio, possessed the technical ingenuity to make that space visible.
[...]
It is this gamesmanship with cinematic space, rather than the personalities of fictional characters or the talents of specific performers, which fascinates <PERSON>. The music of a song provides a temporal coherency against which he can fragment a performance and rebuild it cinematographically, transposing it from theatrical to cinematic space. That is not to say, however, that <PERSON> is wholly an abstractionist. He does not obliterate the potential eroticism of dance, but rather stylizes it, channels it into voyeuristic spectacle. Choruses of anonymous women move through the films in various stages of undress, distanced from the audience by their subordination to intricate patterns of movement either as part of a larger mosaic of bodies or as fleeting figures passed over by Berkeley's restless camera.
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<PERSON>'s career viewed in its entirety assumes a greater coherence than does any one of his films seen individually. 285
None of the musicals he directed has the dramatic focus, for example, of any of a number of works by <PERSON> or <PERSON>. The sheer intensity of his production numbers isolates them from the rest of a film (as if Berkeley conserved his energy for the kind of material that truly engaged him), and much of his best work is to be found in films where his control ended as soon as the music stopped. But within this restricted area <PERSON> created a fascinating body of work uniquely his own. Although he wholeheartedly embraced the vulgarity of the <PERSON> show-girl tradition (and often does it one better), his production numbers escape the leaden kitsch of so many musical fashion shows and pin-up parades both before him and after. Perhaps this is because his transgression of the proscenium arch was an imaginative as well as a logistical strategy, penetrating not simply the spectacle, but the fantasy life of the ideal spectator. <PERSON> violated a convention honored by filmmakers, but more than that he flirted with mental taboos, tapping the mechanism by which dream fuels the pleasure of spectacle. His images ceaselessly play with the logic of looking, with the multiplication and metamorphosis of objects before our gaze. They not only fill the eye, they challenge it.
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