DVD NOTES.(The Clock)(The Gang's All Here)(Video recording review)

The Current Cinema

The Film File

BATTLE OF THE SEXES -- Two of Hollywood's most deliriously stylized movies, Busby Berkeley's "The Gang's All Here," from 1943, and Vincente Minnelli's "The Clock," from 1945, are now available on DVD. Both are Second World War romances involving soldiers on brief furloughs in New York, and their ornate flourishes embellish the tensions of life in wartime.

Berkeley's vertiginous musical, featured in "The Alice Faye Collection" (Fox), was filmed in Technicolor, and the gaudy palette inspired the director's most extravagant visual inventions, starting with a musical number done in long, swooping takes running from a dark soundstage to a shipyard that is revealed to be the colossal set of a Manhattan night club where Carmen Miranda and her tutti-frutti hat hold sway. A soldier about to ship out, the rich young Sergeant Andy Mason, Jr. (James Ellison), lays eyes on a plebeian showgirl, Eadie Allen (Alice Faye), and heatedly pursues her despite his long-standing relationship with the daughter of his father's Wall Street partner. Several dance routines feature Berkeley's classic geometric choreography (including the legendary one with giant bananas), but the film's concluding "Polka Dot Polka," which kaleidoscopically dissolves the characters into ...