Busby Berkeley: Social Realist?

The depression, dearie.
--Ginger Rogers, Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933)

Whoa! Where did that line come from? I thought good old-fashioned Busby Berkeley musicals were too escapist to mention anything as humdrum as the Great Depression.

And what's up with that “We're in the Money” number that opens Gold Diggers of 1933? Film anthologies cite that song so often as evidence of 1930s Hollywood's obsession with escapism that it is a bit ironic to note that that number ends with the local sheriff's men coming in to confiscate the singers' props and costumes in order to make up for all the producer's unpaid bills. I'm sorry but that does not seem very escapist to me.

You could argue that some of the movie's other numbers (“Pettin' in the Park,” for example) are a bit more escapist, but then you get to the show's big finale, “Remember My Forgotten Man,” in which young Carol King (played by Joan Blondell and not to be confused with the songwriter with a similar name) laments the fate of unemployed WW I veterans while receiving vocal accompaniment by Etta Moten Barnett, and suddenly this whole escapism argument seems at best dubious.

True, one is never likely to confuse any Busby Berkeley movie with the works of John Steinbeck. But they do not seem as disconnected from reality as one would expect.

And I, for one, consider that a good thing.