Such a frustrating disappointment

It's no definitive masterpiece but it's damn close.

I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

The talents of Busby Berkeley, Alice Faye, Carmen Miranda, Charlotte Greenwood and Edward Everett Horton are enough to want to check 'The Gang's All Here' out.Watching it for myself, being familiar with a lot of the work of almost all of them (least familiar with Greenwood), 'The Gang's All Here' is well worth the time. Anybody wanting entertainment and spectacular musical numbers need look no further. 'The Gang's All Here' is neither among the best or worst film musicals ever, but it is perfect for an hour and forty minutes of sheer fun and escapism.Don't watch the film expecting to be impressed by the plot, which here is threadbare and very routine and when there is any resemblance of any it's far-fetched, corny and far-fetched. As this is the case of it not being about the story, it was somewhat easy to overlook. It was less easy to overlook the rather rushed romance and James Ellison being as charisma and personality-free a leading man as you can possibly get. Phil Baker is under-utilised and his material is weak, so he doesn't shine here.Alice Faye however certainly does, in fact she charms and allures and her voice is hauntingly beautiful in two of her most beautiful and heartfelt songs in any film. As does the ever exuberant Carmen Miranda, especially in the has-to-be-seen-to-be-believed and enormous fun "The Lady in the Tutti Frutti Hat", which is one of her most classic and unique routines. Busby Berkeley was always a very talented director and choreographer, and that is in evidence in 'The Gang's All Here'. Especially so in the very ahead of its time and jaw-droppingly surreal finale "The Polka-Dot Polka".The film boasts too a great opportunity to see and hear the wonderful talents of Benny Goodman and his orchestra, who are on top form. Edward Everett Horton and Charlotte Greenwood provide hilarious support, Eugene Palette also being very funny.Similarly the songs range from evoking many emotions ("A Journey to a Star," "No Love, No Nothing") to cheering you up without fail after a hard day ("The Lady in the Tutti Frutti Hat", "The Polka-Dot Polka"). Choreographically, it's the latter two songs too that stand out, Berkeley's finales were always spectacular but not many are this ahead of its time and surreal as here. Production-values-wise, it is gorgeously lavish, with exquisite bright colours that leap out of the screen and like a delicious confection, and the cinematography, which is still great throughout, is especially dazzling in "The Polka-Dot Polka". The script has some nice moments too, the best coming from Horton, Greenwood and Miranda's hilariously mangled English.Overall, the gang's all here and so is the entertainment value and spectacular musical numbers. 8/10 Bethany Cox

If you loved the great black & white Berkeley films of the thirties, you are in for a real treat with this movie. Busby Berkeley's musical numbers shot in beautiful Technicolor are a real treat.As you probably know, Berkeley was on loan to Fox for this film, and it seemed to bring out the best in him. The plot was typical Berkeley, including the love triangle, the "putting on a show" subplot, and the nobody becoming a star. The only real difference is, being filmed in 1943, there was also a military subplot.But the plot in a Berkeley film is mostly irrelevant. How can you beat a movie with dancing bananas, neon polka dots, disembodied heads, Benny Goodman's music (and singing), Carmen Miranda's hats, and the delightful Eugene Palette? Twentieth Century Fox has really done up the DVD right. The picture is beautiful, with consistent colors, and nary a scratch or a dust mark to be seen. If you like Berkeley or musicals in general, you really need to see this movie.

The only problem with The Gangs All Here is the plot. It keeps getting in the way of the production numbers. Busby Berkeley manages to shoehorn four major numbers in the just the first 30 minutes, and he doesn't let up much after that. These numbers include everything Busby Berkeley could think of, from Benny Goodman swinging "Minnie's in the Money" to Alice Faye singing "No Love, No Nothing'" to some bizarre extravaganzas featuring lots of thighs, bananas and Carmen Miranda. You'll want to hit the fast forward button at regular intervals to get past the dull parts between them. The story is corny, the romantic misunderstanding is...yawn... and the acting is often weak (James Ellison as the male lead) or prissily unfunny (Edward Everett Horton). Still, the Technicolor is as garish as you could want and the songs by Harry Warren and Leo Robin work well. There's little time to think of anything except the numbers and what Berkeley does with them. Says a commentator in one of the DVD's extras, "He was a dance director who couldn't dance. In a Berkeley production it was the camera that danced." I'm not sure anyone could watch "The Lady with the Tutti Frutti Hat" and not be in awe of how Berkeley not only made use of all those chorines with the giant fruit, but how he kept the action going using his camera in intricately plotted movement. If you watch the Tutti Frutti number a second time, see how many of the chorus dancers you can spot with grim determination, not smiles, on their faces as they lug those giant bananas around and struggle to hit their marks while the camera swoops and turns. The story? Alice Faye is a showgirl. James Ellison is a soldier, the son of a wealthy family soon off to the Pacific. They fall for each other, but he has a sort of girl friend. His parents and the girl's parents think they should get hitched. Will Alice and Jim work things out? They do after approximately 100 minutes. Among the relatives and friends are Carmen Miranda, Eugene Palette, Charlotte Greenwood and Horton, There are a number of reasons to watch this movie, especially if you're interested in Busby Berkeley. It turned out to be his swan song as a major force in the movies. For me, the production numbers are a lot of fun, but the best reason is that classic song by Warren and Robin that Alice Faye introduced... No love, no nothing' / Until my baby comes home. No fun with no one, / As long as baby must roam. I promised him I'd wait for him /Till even Hades froze. I'm lonesome, heaven knows, / But what I said still goes. This became one of America's great songs of longing during WWII. If you want to hear more of them, you can't do better than Jo Stafford and her CD, G.I. Jo - Songs of World War II.

For some reason I've never seen this movie on television though it's reasonable to assume it's been shown over the years so when it surfaced as part of an 8 Fox Musicals boxed set at a silly price (£30, which works out at £3.75 a throw) I snapped it up, especially since 1) it was selling elsewhere at £50 and 2) out of 8 titles I only owned one (Daddy Longlegs). You can't copyright a title, of course, and this was the third movie since 1939 (the second appeared in 1941) called The Gang's All Here and since the other two seem to have sunk without trace this is probably the most substantial. I doubt if anyone went to see this, either at the time or subsequently, looking for a solid plot; chances are they went to see Alice Faye who was just about to abdicate as 'Queen' of the Fox lot, and hear the score though in 1943 they wouldn't necessarily have been aware of Harry Warren and Leo Robin. What Faye did was warmth - as opposed to glamor laced with cynicism (Betty Grable, her immediate successor as 'Queen') or dumb (Marilyn Monroe, who succeeded Grable) - which is not to say she was chopped liver, in fact she was lovely rather than beautiful and the warmth embraced not only her personality but also her voice which she put to good use in her nine-year musical career at Fox during which time she introduced 23 'hits', in fact in the same year (1943) as The Gang's All Here she had already introduced another Harry Warren hit song, You'll Never Know in Hello, Frisco, Hello, a song which, of course, went on to win the Best Song Oscar. She supplemented 'Know' with two more fine ballads in this movie, A Journey To A Star and No Love, No Nothing and the score also included Paducah, Minnie's In The Money - a solo vocal for Benny Goodman? and two typical Busby Berkeley Production Numbers, Carmen Miranda's The Lady In The Tutti-Frutti Hat and Faye's Polka-Dot Polka in which everyone joined in as a grand finale. June Haver popped up as a hat-check girl and Jeanne Crain had one line but the support included - apart from Benny Goodman and his band - Charlotte Greenwood, Eugene Palette and Edward Everett Horton all of whom contributed to a pleasant diversion. Faye, who was pregnant at the time, made one more film two years later, it was a 'straight' role in Otto Preminger's Fallen Angel and in the wake of what she considered Darrell Zanuck's inept editing of what Faye herself considered a fine acting performance she retired from the screen resurfacing some twenty years later in the remake of State Fair. As swan songs go The Gang's All Here isn't bad at all.