The Cinema of Delirium

My local art house's series of pre-Code movies came to its conclusion tonight with a showing of Josef von Sternberg's The Scarlet Empress (1934), a film released mere weeks before the production code put the clamps down on everything fun in movies. The Scarlet Empress is a kind of cinematic delirium, a film so in love with surfaces and textures that it is palpably tactile, a film so drunk on images that it overloads the screen with them. It's one of my very favorite movies. But before I get into that, I need to talk a little bit about the first part of the program. The showing began with the "Lullaby of Broadway" number from The Gold-Diggers of 1935, directed by Busby Berkley. Here's a pair of clips containing the number in question:

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