Busby Berkeley was born on 29 November 1895. He tried to kill himself in the 1940s. And he almost succeeded. He also killed two people while driving drunk (nearly killing himself). Despite all this, he lived to the rip old age of 80, dying on 14 March 1976.
Berkeley is synonymous with his lavish musicals. So you might be thinking that he isn’t a psychotronic filmmaker. But have you ever watched them? They are insane!
But what is a psychotronic film anyway? I first heard the term back in the early 1990s. I was at Movie Madness in Portland, Oregon. And I wanted The Last Man on Earth, but couldn’t find it. So I asked the clerk, and he said, “Oh, it’s in the back under ‘psychotronic.'” I soon became a frequent visitor to that section!
The standard definition of “psychotronic” is that it is the kind of movie you would see at drive-ins during their heyday in the 1950s. But I’ve come to see the term differently. It is more about how you watch films than the films themselves. Psychotronic fans keep their minds open.
I hate that most people will only watch recent big-budget films. When I talk about a film I admire, I most often get the response, “Is it new?” Since I consider any film from 1970 onward as new, we normally miscommunicate after that.
This has led me to the unusual position of thinking of any older film outside of classics like Casablanca as psychotronic. But if you don’t like that, I can assure you that Busby Berkeley films made it to the drive-in. Consider his masterpiece, The Gang’s All Here. It came out in 1943, and I’m sure it was making the drive-in rounds in the 1950s.
But if you’re a purist, he did make a crime drama, They Made Me a Criminal. It features psychotronic actors John Garfield, Claude Rains, Ann Sheridan, and The Dead End Kids. It is in the public domain and Archive has a decent print of it. But I have to go with The Gang’s All Here. If you won’t watch the whole film, at least watch “The Lady In The Tutti Frutti Hat“!
You might think that Busby Berkeley was gay. In fact, he was married six times. Three ended in divorce. Two were annulled. And the final one lasted almost two decades, ending in his death. The median length of his marriages was 14 months. He was not a stable (or happy) guy!
Image cropped from Busby Berkeley Portrait by The Fabulous Miss Fisher under CC BY 4.0.
I very, very rarely use movie clips. But I had to for Broadway Melody of 1933. Because Busby Berkeley is INSANE. “Hey, let’s just have Ginger Rogers sing a verse in Pig Latin!” I don’t know if he was psychotronic, but he sure was psychedelic.
I didn’t know that about the personal life, though. I’d have a hard time if my car killed somebody and it wasn’t my fault. If it was my fault, that’d be awful! John Huston once drove drunk and his date ended up going through the windshield. Geez people did that a lot then. (She recovered, and correctly dumped him.)
Oops, not Broadway Melody of 1933, Gold Diggers of 1933! And I’d forgotten one very psychedelic line in the script! A guy says “what does he use? I’ll smoke it too!”
I’m familiar with that. But I don’t remember it. That’s kind of a problem with these kinds of films. Generally, it’s one or two dance numbers you remember…
“I don’t know if he’s psychotronic, be he’s definitely psychedelic” is a great line! There is a lot of crossover — especially in the 1970s. Have you ever seen El Topo? It is considered the first “midnight movie.” I quite like it. It’s an art film and a psychotronic!
Incidentally, I just got to looking at the Movie Madness link. An actual video rental place, operating in Portland! They even rent VHS! Associated with indie theaters!
All of that is great. But I noticed the ticket prices at the revival theater are pretty darn high. (The video store prices are quite reasonable.) The ticket prices at the one revival theater in Minneapolis are comparable (but we don’t have any video stores in the Twin Cities).
It looks like the Cinema 21 in Portland shows old movies one day a week for reasonable prices (we have a theater in Saint Paul that does so, too). And I do love how that Portland video store operates, per their website.
I hate to see classic cinema becoming like vinyl albums; something only upper-middle-class hobbyists can afford.
I know for a fact that there’s a few old theaters in the Twin Cities that are shuttered, and the landlords just pay property taxes every year for something they hope to sell at top dollar later to a developer.
It wouldn’t be impossible to run a community movie theater the same way we run libraries and such. Free or very low-cost tickets. With trained projectionists who knew how to take care of prints. As a community good.
I personally know rich people who pay $20+ to see old movies in a theater (I never would, are you crazy?) The interest is out there. Commercially, it’d never work, but as a community-funded thing, it could. Just another fantasy, like there being another election that kicks the fascists out anytime before 2075, just a nice thing to dream about.
Incidentally I recently found a website called “Psychotronic Cinema” that seems to have ended in December 2024. No great loss; the author likes all the same critical darlings everyone else does (at least in their “best of 2024” page).
But the “about” page has a nice definition that, I think, fits your writing about Berkeley. “The Psychotronic Cinema website is aimed at highlighting old and new films which may have fallen under the radar of viewers.”
That fits Berkeley! He was well-known in his day, but most modern film fans don’t know who he is. And probably have never seen a full Berkeley musical number! And those are terrific!