Did Carmen Miranda invent performance art? Born in Portugal to middle-class parents who moved to Brazil when she was still an infant, Miranda merged her talents as a samba singer with a flair for designing hats (acquired during an apprenticeship in a Rio de Janeiro milliner’s shop), creating an outlandish persona that has left a surprisingly long-lasting mark on American culture.
From Cindy Sherman to Madonna, artists across the cultural spectrum have continued to build on her flamboyantly absurd representations of the feminine, now anthologized in a new box set from 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment.
Between Miranda and her sympathetic co-conspirator at Universal, the Dominican Republic’s no less preposterous Maria Montez (“Cobra Woman,” 1944), and Lupe Vélez, RKO’s “Mexican Spitfire,” the 1940s saw the birth of an unexpected New Woman — the “Latin bombshell,” imported from south of the border to boost the Roosevelt administration’s Good Neighbor policy. Miranda was a radical break from Alice Faye and Betty Grable, the two original “Fox Blondes” who dominated that studio’s musical production.
Unlike the accessible, warmly appealing lace-curtain Irishwoman represented by Faye and the airbrushed, impossibly perfect pinup portrayed by Grable, Miranda, who died in 1955, was a startlingly unknown quantity, willing to lampoon both feminine decorum and North American notions of South American exoticism.
Apparently without any guiding managerial presence, she created her screen personality on her own: a tiny woman — five feet tall — she augmented her stature with precariously high platform shoes and even more precariously balanced headgear. Beginning with her 1939 Brazilian feature “Banana-da-Terra,” she began to assemble her trademark outfits: kinetic sculptures composed of wax fruit, live birds, ostrich feathers, ropes of beads and exotic silks that she based on the traditional costume of the produce sellers of Bahia.
If Miranda lampooned femininity — as her embrace by several generations of drag performers demonstrates — she also radically expanded the range of options available to actresses in American movies. No less than Jerry Lewis did a decade later, she brought an unpredictable anarchy to the staid business of studio filmmaking.
Just standing there, in one of her insanely, self-consciously excessive costumes, she promised a break from decorum and dignity. Gleefully mangling the English language with a rapid-fire delivery that, paradoxically, demonstrated her mastery of the spoken word, she introduced an element of volatility, idiosyncrasy and flaming narcissism into a Hollywood system that had become staid and conformist.
The centerpiece of this new Fox collection is “The Gang’s All Here” (1943), in a bright new transfer with dramatically enhanced colors that represents a big advance over the disappointingly dull, sallow version that was included in last year’s “Alice Faye Collection.”
The giant bananas, rising and falling in phallic waves in the film’s most famous production number, “The Lady in the Tutti-Frutti Hat,” are once again bright, screen-burstingly yellow. And the fluorescent colors — the hot pink, radioactive red and throbbing purple — are back in much of the full force that defined the brash look of Fox musicals (as opposed to the art-directed tastefulness of MGM).
“The Gang’s All Here” is Miranda’s sole collaboration with Busby Berkeley, the Broadway choreographer turned Hollywood director who was one of her few peers in Hollywood in terms of rampant eccentricity. Berkeley had been enduring a dull period at MGM when Fox borrowed him for “The Gang’s All Here,” and his built-up resentment against MGM’s conservative aesthetics exploded in several audaciously conceived and boldly executed production numbers.
The opening one lasts six minutes and is covered in only two shots, as Berkeley keeps the visuals evolving through constant camera movement rather than editing. This remarkable sequence, set to a medley of the standard “Aquarela do Brasil” and a new song, “You Discover You’re in New York,” by Leo Robin and Harry Warren, evolves through three distinct levels: a wholly abstract environment that proceeds from a dot (which grows into the face of a singer) and a series of lines (which become the hull of a boat), as the undefined space evolves into a New York dock, wheresugar, coffee and Miranda’s gigantic hats are being unloaded from the S.S. Brazil.
A pull back reveals that this vast scene is supposedly happening on the tiny stage of a New York nightclub, suggesting that the extravagant spectacle is taking place entirely within the fevered imaginations of the club patrons: no New York stage short of the Hippodrome could possibly have accommodated it.
And on it goes, with Berkeley’s choreography — of dancers and camera, moving together in close concert — constantly violating the limits of physical reality and common sense. With only a couple of assists from optical effects, the sequences are presented in real time. (One of the pleasures of this new transfer is that that it is sharp enough to reveal Berkeley’s chalk lines on the soundstage floor, laying out the marks that the dancers and camera operators had to hit at exactly the right moment. When the finale, a curious blend of a nostalgic song called “The Polka Dot Polka” and the ballad “A Journey to a Star,” takes off into a play of pure geometric shapes, close observers will notice the live electrical wiring running off the neon hoops held by the chorus girls.)
The visual effects were not a creation of the film lab (or, as it would be today, the computer animation department) but an ingenious application of practical mechanics. Where a contemporary movie like “Speed Racer” has the frictionless facility of a video game, “The Gang’s All Here” seems like an ingeniously designed vintage pinball machine: a triumph of mechanical engineering, not electronics.
“The Gang’s All Here” was the apotheosis of Miranda’s career at Fox, and the other four films in the set follow its decline. Walter Lang’s 1944 “Greenwich Village,” with Don Ameche and Vivian Blaine, and Lewis Seiler’s barely recognizable version of the Cole Porter musical “Something for the Boys” (1944), with Ms. Blaine and Phil Silvers, both have glorious Technicolor and decent production values.
But by the time of Mr. Seiler’s “Doll Face” and “If I’m Lucky” (both 1946), Miranda had been reduced to supporting roles and the Technicolor had taken a powder. She bought out her Fox contract and went freelance, with diminishing success: in the new realism that dominated postwar cinema, which stories could accommodate a character as utterly unreal as the Lady in the Tutti-Frutti Hat?
(20th Century Fox Home Video, boxed set $49.98, individual titles $14.98, not rated)
Da The New York Times, 17 giugno 2008
