Cinemaniac
InCaliente_.jpg
gardenofthemoon.jpgBusby Berkeley, the visionary choreography whose surreal dance numbers in 42nd Street, Gold Diggers Of 1933, Footlight Parade and many more has two rare films now available on Warner Archive's DVD-on demand line. In In Caliente (1935), Pat O'Brien plays Larry MacCarthur, the hard-drinking editor of Manhattan Madness magazine. Edward Everett Horton plays a devoted staff member who whisks him off to Mexico to escape the clutches of a gold digger (Glenda Farrell). There, he falls under the charms of the glamorous Dolores Del Rio who plays a singer with a grudge against MacCarthur for a mean review he once gave her. Berkeley's Lady In Red number musical number is intoxicating. Garden Of The Moon (1938) stars John Payne as an up-and-coming band leader who gets a job at the fabulous Hollywood nightclub Garden of the Moon, where he tangles with a blowhard manager (Pat O'Brien) and a beautiful publicist (Margaret Lindsay). (There's also a crackpot musical number called "the girlfriend of the whirling dervish." Dick Powell, one of Berkeley's favorite leading men, stars in Cowboy From Brooklyn (1938) with Powell as a singer down on his luck who gets a job at a Wyoming dude ranch and is "discovered" by a producer (O'Brien) and his partner (a young Ronald Reagan) and transformed into Steve Gibson, "The Cowboy Crooner." All three films are lightweight and breezy fun.




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