I am a little bit fearful that liking this scene from the WWI Betty Grable film The Pin Up makes me a gigantic Fascist, and leaving aside the issues of fetishizing militarism, if we view the film from the WWII propaganda perspective as it must be, the scene is completely astounding. What starts to play out as a military-themed musical number turns into an extended and totally surreal meditation on who knows what. Note how the space becomes altered in that the exercise has limitless boundaries and the collapses again to the night club at the very end. Can you imagine anything like this, or a scene extended in such a way in a modern film, especially ending the film?
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All hail the monolith…
yeah, the big phallic symbol watches over all.
And the approbation of the men at the very end, necessary else the women appear a bit too independent.
Is it possible this is the very genesis of the ‘girls with guns’ fetish?
A Maginot Chorus Line?
I don’t get the attraction; it doesn’t seem to stray from the conventions of the time and doesn’t rise to the Busby Berkeley surrealist peak.
I guess if you watch it with the rest of the movie, 6 entire minutes of that, which would equal a billion eons in Michael Bay time, just seems so odd to me. As a “number” the fact that it is almost the anti-Berkeley I think is what sets if off. The austerity in place of insanity, also how it plays with space.
Well, at least that answered one question. Betty Grable > Pork Snorkel
Oh, fulsome.
Betty Grable > Pork Snorkel
Can’t have one without the other.
~
I wish real life was more like this.
It is for me.