CAMP CARMEN
The Icon on the Screen
Musically Camp
To approach Carmen Miranda through camp theory as an analytical tool enables a reading of her iconic figure in its time and as it is remembered today and provides a gateway to engaging theoretically the imitations that draw from her image. Camp has most often been associated with a homosexual subculture and the idea of potential sexual subversiveness, gender play, and marginality, a meaning that the term acquired during the 1920s in theatrical argot and that, by the mid-1940s, had become more widespread. Though it commonly maintains these connotations, its meaning has been extended to a more mainstream and general usage, and in film lingo, as Paul Roen specifies, “camp has come to mean any brazen triumph of theatrical artifice over dramatic substance” (1: 9). This statement, similar to those by other critics such as Mark Booth or Michael Bronski, harks back to Susan Sontag’s 1964 much-rehearsed seminal essay “Notes on Camp,” in which she emphasizes the importance of style inherent in camp: “Camp is a vision of the world in terms of style . . . the love of the exaggerated, the ‘off,’ of things-being-what-they-are-not” (56). Though issue has been taken with Sontag’s essay mostly because of its apolitical stance, her text remains the prominent and necessary point of reference in all discussions of camp. Sontag’s deliberations are indeed useful to interpreting Carmen Miranda’s performance and the importance of camp in general within the Twentieth Century-Fox musicals in which she starred.
Through exaggeration, stylization, transformation, ambivalence, incongruity, and playful deception, camp creates an aesthetic that upturns received norms and realities, changing the natural and the normal into style and phoniness. It is a performance that thrives on glamor and extravagance, a phenomenon that presents itself as serious, although it thwarts, by the same token, its own performativity, knowing that it “cannot be taken altogether seriously because it is ‘too much’” (Sontag 59). Yet there must be an element of coherence and consistency for camp to be convincingly camp.
Camp is essential to understanding how Miranda was part of a masquerade in a way that led her to engage with her star image as an artificial, exaggerated version of the baiana, yet without demeaning herself, her gender, or her culture. Through camp we, along with Miranda, can dissociate ourselves from the restrictions of a face-value reading of her baiana performance. All is done in the truly playful, make-believe spirit of the Hollywood musical, which likewise enabled Miranda (with full credit given to her awareness) to wholeheartedly participate in imitations and reinterpretations of her image because she was knowingly part of the game. This subtle interstitial distance corresponds to what I refer to as Carmen Miranda’s performative wink and relies heavily on a camp performativity. It provides a new in-look to this star persona that hopes to remedy, in particular, critical readings that perceive Miranda as naively participating in her caricatural portrayal and fail to consider the distanciation between the image, Miranda’s perception of this image, and, most importantly, Miranda’s interactions with her public that show she too is “in the know,” both at a performative level and behind the scenes.
Engaging Miranda through a camp reading operates along two distinct yet complementary approaches: it acknowledges on the one hand that she was a camp icon both in her films and offscreen, and on the other hand that her characteristics invited the patronage of camp people, or “camping” more generally, because she held a certain appeal by resonating with the camp aesthetic. The focus of this chapter is an analysis of camp in the text of the films themselves and how Miranda exuded camp in a sustained manner in her Twentieth Century-Fox films in particular, through her exaggeratedly feminine figure, humor, and the incongruity of her onscreen persona.1 If camp remains an area of diverse interpretations, it is my contention that examples will provide the fodder to understanding how the concept applies in Carmen Miranda’s films and, in particular, in one of the most camp films of all time, the 1943 Busby Berkeley produced film The Gang’s All Here.
Miranda musicals were popular in their day and continue to project a captivating aura in part because the viewer understands and enjoys Miranda in a camp way. Despite the studio’s cinematic strategies that surpass all naturalist comprehension, the audience that enters into the camp code and captures her performative wink is able to enjoy the artistic camp creation that would otherwise be deemed unrealistic, phony, and cliché. To claim that Miranda is camp is not so much a statement about Miranda as a reflection on our ability to read her as such and understand that we, the viewers, are aware of the playfulness of her star text. Just as Sontag stipulated, “camp sees everything in quotation marks. It’s not a lamp, but a ‘lamp’; not a woman, but a ‘woman’” (56). For example, we know that the “lighthouse” on top of Miranda’s head is not a lighthouse but an excuse for an outrageous Mirandesque headdress, and we accept and delight in the different levels of the narrative as ironic mockery of and challenges to normality. Critics have widely and variably discussed this subjective process, which functions both in the films’ day and in the present day. For Thomas Hess, an understanding of camp “exists in the smirk of the beholder” (53). The “performative logic of camp” (Farmer 113) makes camp discernable for a select few, the spectators who capture its performative wink. Moreover, the actors or performers can also visibly project themselves as being part of this camp game. This distanciation is essential in Miranda’s case: it created a gap for Miranda to view her persona as a stereotype.2 Miranda’s characters all exhibit stylized effeminacy through a camp portrayal that parodies the traditional feminine and, in many cases, also toys with Miranda’s over-the-top Latinidade.3 The key to understanding Miranda’s image resides in its artifice and exaggeration: its camp qualities. As such, these otherwise condoning stereotypes exist only as surface, and Miranda becomes “sheer spectacle” (S. Roberts 15). Priscilla Peña Ovalle corroborates this reading of Miranda as spectacle from a technical point of view through a careful analysis of the camerawork of her dance sequences, which presented Miranda in wide frames that “made her ever-moving body a figure of entertainment, not identification” (55). While some of Carmen Miranda’s musical numbers are filmed with close-ups, the distance established by the camera also plays into this aspect of Miranda as spectacle, allowing the audience to look on from afar, as would the diegetic spectator.
Camp provides a rich discursive space to poke fun at contained sexual/gender identities and to articulate all sorts of “gender trouble” in order to construct new formations of desire and representation. The role gender plays in the articulation of musicals and the camp portrayal in these films is essential to understanding Miranda’s screen image, as gender creates a new dimension for the spectator to negotiate the meaning of the film. One of Philip Core’s most memorable “rules of camp” is the spirited phrase “camp is gender without genitals” (7). Miranda was often perceived as a drag queen, given her hyperfeminization and the over-the-top artifice of her outfits, concentrated in her lavishly designed hats and turbans but also in the bright, contrasting colors of her dresses and the opulence of her jewelry. She is, to borrow from Sontag, “an aesthetic phenomenon . . . not in terms of beauty, but in terms of the degree of artifice, of stylization” (57). As the performative epitome of artifice and stylization, Miranda’s look poked fun at feminine norms through the use of exaggerated heels, hats, jewelry, and glitter-laden outfits and an overabundance of accents (feathers, sparkles, jewels, sequins, baubles), all piled onto her petite frame to instantly create a prime camp icon, one that would be greatly appreciated and appropriated by gender-toying drag queens or imitated in fun-loving, gay impersonations.4 Miranda was a walking fetish, pure spectacle with little visible existence beyond this spectaculization. Through her camp depiction of what was originally a racial and ethnically charged persona, the baiana, Miranda’s own persona jettisoned all trace of racial, ethnic, and class difference to become imbued with sexual, engendered, and political meaning, blurring categories of femininity and masculinity, leading to an aesthetics of gender “without genitals.” This in-between space opens the door for alternative, nonmainstream social and cultural relationships that camp could represent by toying with heterosexual relations, hyperfemininity, female masculinity, masculine femininity, and androgyny. In the world of straight, predominantly white, upper-class couples of the 1940s Hollywood musicals, in pre-Stonewall fashion, any gender deviance could only be expressed through certain performative strategies such as comic relief or camp sensitivity and give way to a productive queer reading.
Although Miranda has been mentioned in relation to camp in several studies, a thorough analysis has not yet been conducted on Carmen Miranda’s star-image as a camp construction and how her camp performativity was integrated into the Hollywood musical. Without necessarily using camp theory, critics unanimously reference Miranda’s exaggerated costumes and the overall effect of her stage presence, slightly “off,” excessive, and different, through which she is both marginalized and placed center stage—essential camp qualities.5 As Rocha writes, Miranda’s performativity can be viewed as “excessively doing a style of excess” (68). By embedding a major camp icon such as Carmen Miranda within a musical, the most camp of all film genres, this combination creates the ultimate camp experience. Camp permeates the musical; it is the major film genre par excellence that relies heavily on artifice, on the trivial, on “‘style’ over ‘content’” (Sontag 62). It is notorious for the lack of convincing plots and is highly stylized and loaded with all forms of literal and metaphorical tinsel and glitter. Ted Sennett views the musical as “a glittering amalgam of music, story, settings, costumes, and performances,” and although he does not mention camp per se, these combinations of glitter-filled elements are core camp components (13). Indeed, as Roen states in his introduction to a discussion of gay camp and the musical, “the Hollywood musical is a genre which, by definition, exudes camp. Any film in which people intermittently burst into song is obviously theatrical, stylized, and patently unreal. Add to this the fact that musicals tend to be all awash with glitter, tinsel and garish artifice, and you begin to see why people associate camp with this genre more than any other” (1: 11).
A young Mexican-American boy dresses as Carmen Miranda in Los Angeles in the mid-1940s. Courtesy of the Shades of LA collection, Los Angeles Public Library
In contrast to the melodramas, film noirs, gangster movies, horror films, and screwball comedies that dominated the 1930s and early 1940s, the genre of the musical film stood out as one of the preferred and most lucrative forms of production ever, especially since its early 1930s revival with the Warner Brothers 1933 series of backstage musicals (42nd Street, Footlight Parade, and Gold Diggers of 1933). In particular, the musical brought gaiety, humor, and dreams of luxury, opulence, and evasion to the silver screen and lightened the minds of post-Depression/pre-World War II movie patrons, and camp strategies were essential to assuring the musical’s enduring success. This correlates with some of the aspects Esther Newton defines as essential for understanding the relationship between camp and the musical, namely incongruity as the subject matter, theatricality as its style, and humor as its strategy (106). The incongruity can exist at many different levels of the camp musical, but the producers worked from the premise that no one would mind a disjointedly contrived story when it was pieced together so beautifully with musical intermissions, of which Carmen Miranda’s numbers were among the most outstandingly lavish. Audiences delighted in these musical numbers that brought to the big screen the extraordinary talent and precision of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, the artistry and choreographic brilliance of the Nicholas Brothers, the unique voices of Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Judy Garland, Alice Faye, and Betty Grable, and the big bands of Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman, Xavier Cugat, and Harry James, among so many others. What made an exceptional musical film was never the storyline, and the producers knew the importance of loading their musicals with top-quality song-and-dance numbers, many of which were specialty acts, disconnected from the plot and often involving performers who had no acting part. There were two basic types of musical segments, both with potential camp interpretation: staged numbers in which there is an explicit audience in the film that watches the musical presentation—these were the characteristic Carmen Miranda numbers—or the so-called book numbers that originated in the mid-1930s with the release of Gold Diggers of 1935 (1935) and are integrated as part of the narrative, with at least lip-service toward some connection to the plot, as in the “I-feel-a-song-coming” moods so typical of the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movies (Berry, Screen Style 57). While the campiness of book numbers draws from the mere incongruity of the act, the staged numbers have no pretense of being integrated within the plot. As the examples in this chapter illustrate, the sheer excessiveness of these latter segments stages camp through exaggerated theatricality and stylizations, the visual richness of sound and color, sumptuous textures, and dizzying movements as they create an over-the-top, definitely not real, but inevitably appealing fantasy world on the screen.
The musical’s garish theatrical qualities, while not reliant on color, were exponentially enhanced by the advent of Technicolor, which became a staple of musicals in the 1940s and part of Twentieth Century-Fox musicals’ signature aesthetics. Carmen Miranda was a great match for Hollywood’s new color palette: she fitted the “Technicolor type” that Sarah Berry relates to female stars with “vivid features and personalities” (“Hollywood Exoticism” 193). Furthermore, the musical’s extravagance of sound, which camp exploits, stems from the abundance of production numbers that ran the full gamut of musical genres, from patriotic big-band swing and jazz to foreign sounds of rhumba, conga, salsa, and samba, often Americanized for a US-based audience and peppered with romantic ballads, since most musicals had some resemblance of a love story. Lastly, grandiose movements achieved through the inclusion of large production numbers with lines of chorus girls dancing, twirling, and gesticulating in all different manners only intensify the overall feeling of abundance. For such extravaganza to be perceived as camp, the spectator must be aware of the film’s heightened degree of artifice but willing to play along with this game of make-believe that transcends all norms of reality through an explosion of the senses.
The essential distinction between kitsch and camp merits a brief mention, as both performative aesthetics tend to rely on artificiality and oftentimes imitation. However, while certain scholars have referred to Miranda as kitsch, in this chapter I will demonstrate that her screen persona is undoubtedly far from kitsch, which is synonymous with cheap, overdone themes that are uncreative and often painfully overproduced. As Kjellman-Chapin argues, words used to describe kitsch include “shallow,” “superficial,” “clichéd,” “trivial,” and “aesthetically and morally bankrupt” (28). Impersonations of Miranda can, and often do, tend toward kitsch aesthetic when reproduced by combining cheap imitation with instant recognition (Linstead 658). In these kitsch interpretations, the imitation artist creates something that is so readily understood that it offers nothing to challenge the viewer and draws on the most stereotypical core aspects of Miranda’s image, staying true to the “reiterative character of kitsch, which extracts from an original work only that effect which can be reproduced en mass” (Santos 87). Kitsch objects are taken at face value without pretense or fake aspirations. They are not manufactured to be ironic, unlike the more complex camp aesthetic that plays on the multifaceted nature of its creation. The kitsch nature of many of the Miranda imitations does not necessarily divest them of camp performativity, yet their relative cheapness and clichéd composition, displaced from their original context, remains fundamentally a copy of the original, lavishly artistic Miranda costumes and performances. Kitsch is known to aspire to authenticity through mimicry; unlike kitsch, camp has no such honorable intentions.
From this distinction, my contention that Carmen Miranda’s authentic stage persona is essentially and fundamentally camp enables the modern viewer to understand her performance in a way that we can read as deliberate, entertaining, and certainly not altogether serious. Other than in her first film, Down Argentine Way, Miranda had a character role to play within the narrative, and there were necessarily different levels to understanding her part. However, as an actress, silenced beneath her extravagant costumes, it is her visual image that drives the scenes where she appears and invariably dominates, rather than any spoken part or even the content of her dialogues.
Although some camp films did feature male actors prominently, as is certainly the case with the Gene Kelly MGM musicals, for most of the Hollywood musicals of the era, women were the center of the narrative and often accompanied by lightweight but very pleasant and nice-looking male actors who, for the most part, remained secondary to the plot with limited time on screen and a lack of close-ups and dialogues.6 Given this abundance of female camp icons, the question that guides this inquiry is simply, what makes Carmen Miranda so quintessentially camp and distinguishes her from these other women? Among the female film icons, María Montez of Universal Studios is the actress who most closely resembles Miranda’s mold of camp representation. Pigeonholed in the role of the foreign princess, always clad in gorgeous costumes, with a ridiculously strong accent and inconsequential dialogues, Montez’s screen appeal is primarily visual, featured in exotic settings and alongside young, foreign-looking men or adolescent costars. From the lushly romantic Arabian Nights fantasies to the quintessential Montez vehicles of camp and glitz such as Cobra Woman (1944), in which she plays twin sisters, or the never-never land of Gypsy Wildcat (1944), her roles never change substantially, and some scenes are overloaded with camp perceived through the lush music, Technicolor, gaudy costumes, absurd melodrama, and often second-rate acting, to the point that Roen refers to Montez as “sublimely talentless” (2:11). The similarities between the two actresses appear obvious, yet Miranda’s campiness is such an over-the-top spectacularization that she has become an icon in a category all by herself.
Moreover, criticism has tended to dwell on the baiana as the inspiration for Miranda’s costume yet without being able to make the theoretical leap to Carmen Miranda’s trademark vision of excess. Camp performativity is the missing link to critically engaging Miranda’s Hollywood screen persona. During her early career, she represented the baiana without playing with camp aesthetics: the tensions of incongruence from hyperstylization, explicit gender reversal, mockery, or self-parody were not part of her projected image on the Carioca stage, nor could they be. Miranda’s Brazilian baiana was too close to original Bahian women, and in particular the Carioca stylized baiana that, as discussed in Chapter 1, was ubiquitous throughout Rio. However, during the same period, the cross-dressing male baiana impersonators of Rio’s Carnival celebrations and parades were much more in line with camp sensitivity as they appropriated the image through a gender-bending, parodic, and fun-loving irreverence that, within the carnavalesque mode of fantasy and lawlessness, exaggerated the femininity of the baiana.
While Busby Berkeley’s megamusical production The Gang’s All Here (1943) is discussed later in this chapter in detail, a camp reading of Miranda’s other films, with an emphasis on her Twentieth Century-Fox films, is much overdue. Any film starring Carmen Miranda is bound to have camp in abundance, mostly centered on her persona and the grand production numbers of which she was an integral part. The following discussion draws selectively from Miranda’s films to illustrate the extent of her camp performance, even though, truth be told, no scene, neither before nor after, could ever outdo Busby Berkeley’s “Lady in the Tutti Frutti Hat” in the camp register. Camp performativity is so embedded throughout Miranda’s films that, when analyzed, they collectively reveal common aspects. The following examples illustrate how these films portend a camp performativity through the combination of Miranda’s eccentric costumes; offstage theatricality, incongruity, and humor; self-referentiality mixed with self-parody; stylized book numbers; and, most memorably, grandly staged musical numbers.
Camp interest in Carmen Miranda’s films centers on her costumes; while invariably over-the-top, the majority can only be described as absolutely fabulous. Furthermore, to consistently reinforce the impact of her image, the visual appeal is constantly renewed, as she appears wearing a different designer outfit in each new scene, and each costume presents elite couture in the exclusive Miranda style. Her persona required an excessive use of costume, as her theatricality and screen personality drew from her visual impact, all the more so as her Hollywood film career developed and the audience expected her costumes and scenes to privilege the expressive over the realist effects, with her eccentric styles throwing into disarray all resemblance of a normal star wardrobe.
Miranda’s signature look with her fruit-laden headdresses was soon diversified with creative combinations of flowers, feathers, butterflies, lamps, parasols, candy canes, or spikes of wheat, and amazingly nothing seemed out of place. Indeed, so much of Miranda’s camp performance draws from her headdresses, and there is a sense of camp playfulness in their creative license. How else could the viewer fully appreciate the striped “Mickey Mouse” turban she wears in The Gang’s All Here or the candy-cane headdress in Greenwich Village? Miranda’s headdresses are central to the creation of camp performativity in her films: they transform what would be ordinary hats or turbans into extraordinary ones and mark Miranda’s screen presence with their combinations of colors, textures, and materials. While the Miranda look maintains its “formula,” the headdress/hat/turban creativity seems to have no boundaries. Simply put, as Babuscio writes, “camp aims to transform the ordinary into something more spectacular” (122). The spectacular quality of Miranda’s headdresses was designed for overall impact and drew from the premise that unusual combinations of objects created a sense of whimsy. While items on a headdress may have borne some resemblance of realism, others were fantastical fruits, oddly colored leaves and foliage, or unrecognizable objects that even (or especially) in cinematic close-ups challenged all description. Moreover, the use of unusual color combinations or materials enhanced the campiness of her look, such as the stunning, stark-black butterflies created by Sascha Brastoff for a headdress in If I’m Lucky or the leopard-print turban in Doll Face. Her headdresses complemented the rest of Miranda’s outfit, the color scheme, or the set decor, and the overall effect was more striking than the individual parts.
Carmen Miranda’s candy-cane costume in a photo still for Greenwich Village (1944). Courtesy of Photofest
Miranda’s most unusual, exquisite, and utterly camp headdresses in plots of little variety were among the few distinguishing elements of the different films. In Greenwich Village (1944) Miranda wears a pink and white outfit reminiscent of a candy cane with a bevy of oversized candy-cane sticks protruding out of her headdress in every direction along with pink lollypops and a large pink ribbon. As though a candy-cane headdress were insufficient in the camp-headdress registry of a single film, in another scene there is a flash shot of Miranda in her dressing room trying on a parrot in a cage for a headdress, combining her tropical, exotic appeal with her iconic, signature headdress in a unique camera fade-in and -out that lasts a blink of an eye.
While some combination of fruit is widely considered to be the more “classic” Miranda headdress, immortalized beyond all proportions in The Gang’s All Here, it is surprising how few of the headdresses in her films rely on this motif, no doubt also due to the need to add variety and renewed appeal to each subsequent film, as discussed in Chapter 4. The gold-studded butterflies on a lilac cushioned headdress in The Gang’s All Here, the stunning white pom-poms in Greenwich Village’s costume-ball scene, the arrangement of colorful parasols in Nancy Goes to Rio, and the assortment of kitchen utensils, complete with forks, knives, an egg-beater, and spaghetti tongs, in Scared Stiff are some of the more striking examples of nonfruit Miranda headdresses. These motifs reinforce the concept that the turban, hat, or scarf was literally the platform for the designers’ creativity, on which, in a single film, they could juxtapose an array of styles. Yvonne Wood, who designed Miranda’s costumes at Twentieth Century-Fox for five of her later films, namely The Gang’s All Here, Greenwich Village, Four Jills and a Jeep, Something for the Boys, and Doll Face, developed her own Miranda-trademark style with a combination of outrageous headdresses interspersed with more discrete but typically unusual and mostly very flamboyant hats or turbans for her offstage scenes. With such a strong identification of Miranda’s costume with a headdress, in the scenes where her head garb is played down, something appears rather “off” with her depiction. It is an image that destabilizes her impact because it removes the visual buffer that the headdress portends, yet even “stripped down,” she remains an excessively exuberant screen persona. In some scenes, the designers carried the turban motif over into Miranda’s offstage appearances in the films, marking her as camp beyond the internal proscenium stage by blurring the onstage/offstage performativity of her character. In That Night in Rio, Miranda’s character appears at a dinner party hosted by the Baron (a double role played by Don Ameche) in an amazing black outfit covered with sequins and a white turban topped with feathers, one of Travis Banton’s most exquisite designs. To perform for the dinner guests, Miranda’s character is already wearing one of her fabulously sumptuous turbans and merely removes the upper part of the black outfit to reveal a white long-sleeved top with her signature bare midriff and an abundance of necklaces. In Weekend in Havana, there is only a slight distinction between the costumes Miranda’s character Rosita Rivas wears as she performs her songs at the Casino Madrileno and those she wears offstage, and all invariably dominate the scenes. At one point on her way to a rehearsal, Rosita shares a scene with the businessman Jay Williams (John Payne), who wears a dull gray suit. In stark contrast, Miranda appears wearing a bright orange and white dress and a white turban, with two large white baskets lined with a sheer orange fabric draped elegantly around her head and framing her face beautifully, and she is excessively accessorized with a large golden pendant, white gloves, thick bracelets, and an oversized white purse. The viewer even catches a glimpse of her platform shoes when the camera pulls back and shows a full-body take as she exits the scene. Later that evening, in another offstage scene at “El Arbolado” fine and private dining, Rosita’s outfit is a dazzling white fringe-covered dress, a high-1940s style adapted to Miranda’s look, with the addition of two diamond-shaped openings on each side of her midriff. In lieu of a turban, she wears several bright white gardenias in her hair, along with a silver necklace and a large ring for accessories. Both of these costumes clearly hark back to Miranda’s signature diegetic stage outfits and are equally as exquisite.
Greenwich Village is the film that most blatantly throughout the plot toys with the blurring of Miranda’s character’s identity, both on and off the proscenium stage and with a mixture of alleged nationalities. Playing the role of fortune teller and performer Princess Querida O’Toole, Miranda consistently appears in luxurious, colorful costumes, with variants on the headdress and turban that include hair wraps, head scarfs, half-turbans (with her hair rolled up in a front bun or to the side), elaborate hairdos with a scarf for added color, and even a large hair bow when she is depicted sitting in her bed in silk pajamas. While her stage headdresses are quintessentially camp (candy canes, black butterflies, white pompoms), the dialogues that make specific reference to the differences between her on- and offstage costumes are saturated with irony and point to Miranda’s role as first and foremost a spectacle. When Bonnie Watson (Vivian Blaine) bumps into Querida carrying an armful of boas, feathers, accessories, strings of golden beads, and an assortment of small plastic fruits, she wonders what on earth Querida is carrying. “It’s my costume!” Querida replies, all the while wearing quite the flamboyant street-clothes outfit, complete with pink and yellow fabric flowers in her bun and a neck full of ruffles.
As these examples illustrate, whether on or off the proscenium stage in her films, Carmen Miranda is always a fashion spectacle. Camp pervades her performativity as she navigates between her on- and offstage theatricality, reinforced by dialogues that either she or her costars articulate and that translate her performative wink through a mixture of good-humored, ironic, and comical commentary on the artificiality of her screen persona. Springtime in the Rockies (1942) is the film that most blatantly pries open this gap between Miranda’s appearance and its perception through dialogues that revolve around the costumes of her character, Rosita Murphy. Newly hired as a secretary for Dan Christy (John Payne), Rosita wears outfits that are both impractical and comically inappropriate, visually denoting over-the-top artificiality that becomes all the more apparent through the self-referentiality of the dialogues. “Good neighbors!” exclaims Dan as he turns to see Rosita wearing a bright orange skirt; a revealing bodice that exposes her bare midriff; large, frilly, protruding sleeves; and a turban adorned with swinging tassels. “Is that what a secretary wears in Brazil?” In an infantilized and coquettish voice, Rosita answers, “Why? You don’t like my outfits? I think it’s a knockdown!” Dan candidly reiterates the carnivalesque aspect of her stylized, out-of-place outfit: “Well what good is it to you if there’s not a Mardi Gras in town?” Debra Walters echoes the exact sentiment of this script when she writes that with “Carmen Miranda’s small frame and large facial features exaggerated and enhanced by wardrobe and cosmetics, she always seemed prepared for a costume party of the Carnival” (64). The artificiality of the scene is heightened by the unobstructed view of Lake Louise on the backdrop; like so many of these early Technicolor sets, it features a brash use of color that is far from naturalistic but rather a glaring eyesore in a scene already overcharged with color.7 In a film set at a resort on Lake Louise in the Canadian Rockies, staged against artificial backdrops, with an unrealistic, contrived plot and a motley group of protagonists, Miranda’s stylized costumes actually seem to fit right in with the rest of the film’s comic absurdity. There are also flash moments of incongruity, which may have been more logical in the plot’s first drafts but, after edits, ended up as pointless scenes or unfinished storylines. At one point, there is a glimpse of Miranda running around with an oversized stuffed duck that matches the colors of her outfit. It boggles the mind what the role of such a prop could possibly be, but then again, in a musical where Rosita ends up in the Canadian Rockies, brought there with her six brothers and employed by Dan Christy, who hired her from the tourist counter in the Detroit airport, there certainly are more unanswered questions than realistic situations. After Rosita’s first reacquaintance with her boss, she summons her six brothers (Bando da Lua), and what follows is Miranda’s only book number in all of her North American films. Rosita asks Dan if he likes Brazilian music, to which he sarcastically and unenthusiastically replies, “I love it!” With this affirmative albeit insincere response, Rosita, accompanied by her brothers, proceeds to perform a Brazilian rendition of “Chattanooga Choo Choo.” Miranda moves gracefully around the full space of the lounge, twirling her hands and dancing backward and forward in front of Dan—her audience of one—and even intersperses a few beats of “Chica Chica Boom Chic,” rehearsed from her second Twentieth Century-Fox film, That Night in Rio, for added “Brazilian” flavor. This scene establishes the nature of the relationship between Dan and Rosita that will have no resemblance of secretarial duties, and when Dan wants to make his ex-girlfriend jealous, he buys Rosita an elegant evening gown that consists of a long white skirt and a bodice exposing her bare midriff, matched with a white synthetic turban topped with a white bow. “All it needs now,” Rosita complains to her socially awkward and stiff love interest McTavish (Edward Everett Horton), “is some beads, some flowers, some fruits, baubles, knacks-knicks. Give me ten bucks. I have an idea.” Certainly unusual in a Miranda vehicle, Rosita’s outfit has a story, and the dialogue highlights the character’s role in embellishing the dress. In a subsequent scene, Rosita appears with a much-transformed outfit, now with colors of turquoise and brown, lavishly adorned with jewels, necklaces, exquisite fabric added around the shoulders and turban, and a belt with large jewels, all in all a very tasteful “upgrade” from the plain white dress it originally was made to appear. Later, the Latin beau Victor Prince (Cesar Romero) comments on her dress after dancing a few steps with her, “Miss Murphy, you look ravishing in that gown!” To which she ironically answers, “Oh I feel absolutely undress-ed, like a strip-squeezer!” McTavish also admires the gown as the fruit of his ten-dollar sponsorship. As in many instances throughout Miranda’s Hollywood films, her costume’s rich textures and luxurious materials evoke a highly tactile sensuality that embellishes the overall camp effect. In this case, the camp performativity is further heightened by the ongoing commentary on her outfit by the film’s three main male characters, engendering the gaze directed toward her lavish costume. Moreover, this is one of the most elaborate Miranda costumes worn both on and off the proscenium stage as both a dinner gown and her performance attire when she seamlessly, and with no logical sequencing, takes the floor to perform “Tic-tac do meu coração” (The tick tock of my heart), accompanied by her band.8 Diffusing the camp effect to one of the other characters, Springtime in the Rockies includes an unusual sequence centered on Phoebe Gray (Charlotte Greenwood), the typical unattached “old maid” of the Hollywood storylines. The campiness draws from the tensions present in this scene that juxtapose comedy and awkwardness as Phoebe, in drunken stupor, exhibits herself on an empty dance floor, a sequence that is explicitly narrated through Phoebe’s voice-over, and the fact that this marginal character suddenly takes center stage in the film. She degradedly refers to herself as “Phoebe the wallflower” as the camera follows her hunt for an immediate dance partner she hopes will double as a long-term soul mate. In this memorable sequence, Phoebe’s voice narrates her situation play by play and reflects back on her lonely condition, with references that are both colorfully humorous and sadly realistic: “It isn’t because they can’t see me, I’m lit up like a flaming torch!” she says, making reference to her bright orange dress as she heads straight for the dance floor and the spotlight follows her. Stating the obvious, she announces her intentions: “I think I’ll buzz about a bit . . . there must be an unattached man around somewhere.”9 The scene loses all sense of decorum as she unexpectedly, and as though even surprising herself, gives a few of her characteristic high leg kicks to the side and then catches herself, chuckling at her own ridicule, “Of course that ain’t exactly lady-like . . . are you kidding?” She continues to dance around, making windmills with her arms and side-to-side leg kicks, as other dinner guests are brought into the camera’s focus, laughing and applauding her dance “performance.” She ends up in the splits and then staggers off the dance floor, doubled over and suddenly horrified that people are watching her, thus ending a brilliantly conducted scene that is both fun and funny for the internal and real audience.10
In Greenwich Village, the lyrics of the opening song mirror this self-reflective strategy as Miranda’s character, Princess Querida, appears dressed in full-body, candy-cane regalia and sings about peppermints and candy. This creates the distanciation that camp requires between the camp object and its perception, as discussed above. “He’s sweet like peppermint candy, and just like honey from the tree,” proclaim the lyrics, before evolving into a Portuguese verse where Miranda sings of acarajé (a traditional dish from Northeastern Brazil) and Praça Mauá (a square in the center of Rio with historical significance as a port of entry to the city) and even translates the lyrics from “he’s wild about me” into the Portuguese “anda louquinho por mim.” Despite the exactness of the translation—naturally lost on a non-Portuguese speaking audience—these Brazilian cultural references bear no impact on the content of this number that, in true camp fashion, is style devoid of meaning, a spectacle of colors, movement, and sound.
Camp in Grand: Musical Finales
The musical numbers are by their very essence aggregates into the film whose plot was, for the most part, what Ted Sennett referred to as “merely a peg on which to hang the musical score” (13). Throughout her tenure in Hollywood, Miranda’s standard role was that of a performer, naturally expected to sing and dance at some point in the film before a proscenium audience with her showstopper costumes and an overall impact of exotic otherness, charisma, and whimsical playfulness, all beautifully camp.
Missing from Down Argentine Way but becoming the trend in subsequent Miranda vehicles are the grand, extremely camp, large-scale musical numbers that showcase the star surrounded by chorines or male dancers on stages filled to the brim with color, movement, and texture. Despite the extreme campiness of the finale of Down Argentine Way, with its fairytale ending, over-played tunes, unrealistic stage sets, and stylized choreography and singing, complete with a singing horse (at which point one suspends all disbelief), the scene lacks the magnitude and the opulence that emanates from the large-group dance numbers of Miranda’s subsequent films, which are possible once Miranda moves to Hollywood, as the following emblematic scenes illustrate.
The opening of That Night in Rio presents the standard formula for Miranda’s Twentieth Century-Fox musical numbers: a solo number that leads into a spectacular large chorus number, with Miranda returning for the coda. This scene opens on a fantastical backdrop of Rio’s Corcovado Mountain flanking a lagoon, with palm trees and a fireworks display, as Miranda enters from the back of the stage, greeted by an archway of sparklers and garbed in one of her most fabulous costumes of all times: a long, shimmering silver skirt, opulent silver jewelry on her neck and wrists, and topped with a silver fruit-laden turban. After Miranda sings her part in Portuguese to “Chica Chica Boom Chic,” Don Ameche, dressed as a US Navy admiral, makes his grand entrance in a convertible coupe to sing his salutations in English on behalf of “130 million Americans,”11 and Miranda joins him for the chorus of “Chica Chica Boom Chic,” which “don’t make sense” but “it came down the Amazon / From the jungles / Where the natives greet / Everyone they meet / Beatin’ on a tom-tom.”12 Continuing the Amazon theme, the camera focuses in on “jungle” drums as the stage is filled with a bevy of mini-Miranda chorines, decked in golden tops and red turbans tied up with orchids. Their skirts resemble tropical birds, with plumage of dark blue, turquoise, green, red, and yellow feathers, outrageously garish and indistinguishably camp as they twirl with their male partners coordinately clad in royal-blue pants and shiny, striped, colorful shirts opened to reveal their hairless bare chests. The colored stage lights add to the dream-sequence effect of the scene and seem to gyrate along with the movement of the dancers. The music accelerates and evolves into a swing jive with a Latin beat, all with an eerie instrumental tone that subsides to welcome Miranda back on the stage for her final chorus. From the stylized Carioca backdrop to the lyrics of the song, the garish costumes, the sparklers, and the fireworks, the scene represents the Hollywood musical at its camp best, purposefully over-the-top, excessively flamboyant, and unrealistically bright, and all of it centered on Carmen Miranda.
The grand finale of Weekend in Havana is another of these excessive visual treats that in glorious camp fashion explodes into pure spectacle, fabulously choreographed with the resemblance of a new dance fashion set against a backdrop of a luxurious column-flanked dance floor with a double marble stairway. The original song and dance “The Ñango” features playful, catchy, fun-loving choreography, as was Hermes Pan’s signature style, around the theme of “Let’s have fun and do the Ñango.” Miranda wears one of her most sumptuous costumes: a flamboyant golden skirt, headdress towered high with red, green, and gold feathers and baubles, matching ruffled bodice, and opulent golden necklaces, creating an overall effect of elegance and luxury. As mentioned above, Miranda’s costume sets the tone, colors, and textures for the costumes of the chorus girls and male dancers. Miranda’s character, Rosita Rivas, introduces the number in a typical solo song and dance that she performers for the internal audience/dinner guests, gliding gracefully from table to table as the camera zooms in on Miranda’s fabulous costume. Then Miranda look-a-like chorines wearing beautifully coordinated long yellow, red, and green blocked skirts and turbans adorned with tall, elegant feathers descend the magnificent double stairway and dance to an instrumental movement of “The Ñango,” shaking their maracas to mark the beat, soon to be joined by their male partners. The three-toned red, yellow, and green blocks on the male dancers’ caps and pants have a jester quality to them. As they dance around pairing off with the chorus girls, there is a gender-neutralizing effect about these men, who appear too feminized in their three-quarter trousers and flouncy sleeves to display any convincing virility. Just when the viewer thinks the spectacle has reached its peak, Miranda breaks out from the dancing and invites the audience to join them on the main dance floor with an emphatic, “Come on, everybody dance!” as all age groups dance around rumbustiously, having instantly learned this new dance craze. There is a sense of wild abandon conveyed in this scene, underscored by unconventional cinematographic techniques such as crane shots, canted angles, and occasional close-ups that add new dimensions to the festivities. The main female star of the film, Nan Spencer (Alice Faye), in a striking, full-length purple gown, stands out among the dancing crowd, where she can be easily spotted, as the love interest Jay Williams (John Payne) enters, they are reunited, and all is forgiven. Likewise, Monte Blanca (Cesar Romero) enters the dance scene, running from a creditor and hoping to “save his life” with a loan from Jay Williams, and ends up securely ensconced in the midst of the dance to complete the tableau next to his fiancée, Rosita. A reprise of the film’s theme tune, “Weekend in Havana,” brings the musical full circle and reestablishes the prominence of the storyline with the resolution of the two couples dancing gaily with arms linked as the camera fades out. The final camera shot that focuses on the two couples reverts the overwhelming and destabilizing impact of the spectacular number with a nod in the direction of heteronormativity in the midst of such campiness and gender-bending.
Carmen Miranda’s next Twentieth Century-Fox film, Springtime in the Rockies, ends with an internal staged show featuring a number that is just as impressive as “The Ñango.” The scene begins with a song-and-dance duet by Vicky Lane (Betty Grable) and her performing partner Dan Christy (John Payne) in front of a dark proscenium curtain that silhouettes Betty Grable’s slender figure emphasized by a long, sleeveless, formfitting white dress with a high slit up its left side. They alternate singing a few phrases of the first part of the “Pan-American Jubilee” that foregrounds hemispheric, good-neighborly unity through its suggestive lyrics: “How would you like to go / To say hello to your neighbors? . . . Come and drink a toast / And get close to your neighbors!” This invitation segues into the grand celebration behind the curtain that is taking place in the spirit of Pan-Americanism, bringing people together through music, singing, and dancing: “You’re gonna see the way those Latins / Like to jitter bug / Like to cut a rug / Like a Yankee doodle dandy / Like to do a rhumba / And a samba! / It’s goin’ down in history as a jumpin’ fiesta!” As the curtains open, the tempo of the music accelerates to the rhythm of “voodoo,” jungle-sounding drums as the choir takes over the lyrics of the song that has now modulated to a higher pitch, echoing through the change in the music that Pan-Americanism is being taken to another level. The stage is filled with twirling dance partners dressed in colorful “Latin” costumes that match Carmen Miranda’s costume as she makes her grand entrance. The overall impression is one of twirling purple, white, pink, and green dresses, sashes, and hats. One of the groups in particular stands out, the men wearing shiny purple pants and the women frilled pink and white skirts, white puffy-sleeved blouses, green scarves tied around their waists revealing bare midriffs, and small brimmed hats on top of discrete, green turbans, all elements that resonate with Miranda’s typical colorful costumes. As Miranda enters from the back of the stage, the dancers part to let her through, and her costume steals the show: in contrast to the lightweight fabric of Grable’s dress, it consists of a full white skirt adorned with a thick, purple-fur border along the bottom hem and matching fur around a generous off-the-shoulder neckline, and a bare midriff, an outfit that Darlene Sadlier has referred to as a “winterized version of her trademark costume, whose ruffled trim resembles a Sonja Henie skating costume” (180). A headdress topped with towering-high purple flowers that coordinate with the skirt’s flower motif complements the outfit. Miranda code-switches as she sings her verses, with the words “samba” and “rhumba” placed at the end of Portuguese phrases, where they are easily discernible. She dances an abbreviated version of a swing routine with Cesar Romero and is then substituted by Betty Grable as the dancers form a circle around them. Grable, now dressed in a short, light-blue dress with long fringes that flair up as she twirls around, dances a quick-paced swing routine with Romero, proving the international unity of the Fiesta Pan-Americana as an American/Latin partnership takes the stage. Even Phoebe Gray (Charlotte Greenwood)—no longer the wallflower, now partnered with the stiff but good-natured McTavish (Edward Everett Horton)—performs a brief dance routine, complete with the signature “Greenwood side kicks.” The number ends with the four main characters, joined by Phoebe, linking arms and marching gaily toward the front of the stage and singing with gusto as the camera pulls back. The final shot is an overhead view of this spectacle exploding with color and movement, with the dancers swirling around in unison. It is the apogee of this Pan-Americana fiesta of dancing, singing, textures, languages, and music as the film also comes to an end, merging both the internal show and the film-vehicle, which ends in pure celebratory mode.
Placed centrally in Greenwich Village, the costume-ball song-and-dance number is steeped in camp sensitivity through a combination of its carnivalesque qualities, theatricality and incongruity, overall impression of artifice, and self-reflectiveness. The opening song, “Art for Art’s Sake,” is an original, catchy tune whose repetitive lyrics (“Whatever we do, we only do for art’s sake”) are a playful spoof of artists’ pretensions in general and are all the more pertinent given the context of the musical. Greenwich Village is set in the homologous New York City neighborhood in the early 1920s and revolves around the patrons and artists of a speakeasy called “Danny’s Den,” whose owner, Danny O’Mara (William Bendix), aspires to put on a show, the Greenwich Village Gaieties, to outdo the Ziegfeld Follies and showcase his star talent and love interest, Bonnie Watson (Vivian Blaine).13 Camp is present throughout the film, from the decors of the speakeasy (a huge pirate’s ship that has no bearing on the plot), to the characters’ visible overacting, to the over-the-top musical numbers, to the absurdity of a low-class Manhattan speakeasy owner’s aspiring to become the producer of a high-class theatrical production, to all the typical aspects of Carmen Miranda’s performance. In the costume-ball scene, the camp performativity is enhanced by the constant blurring of what is considered a stage or an audience as the number develops and leaves the viewer with the uneasy feeling that all the players are both participants and observers, pointing to the truism that “all the world’s a stage.”
The scene opens with Brophy (B. S. Pully), Danny’s right-hand man, singing in his very distinct, raspy, low voice the first few lines of “Art for Art’s Sake” and inviting all to join the celebration. Then the gay partygoers take over the chorus as the camera follows through to the main dance hall, where women and men are dancing and singing, some being carried around in a circular motion toward the static camera, with an overall impression of revelry, make-believe, and excess in the neon-bright colors, feathers, tinsel, masks, and boas, not to mention an abundance of bare legs and arms. Danny, dressed as Julio Cesar in a toga, and Bonnie, as a showgirl in a skimpy emerald-green outfit with silver trimmings and a matching, awkwardly tall party hat, are a riot as they make their grand entrance in a chariot, pulled by Brophy in a Renaissance costume and a wig with long, blond ringlets. As though that is not enough camp for the eyes to behold, the trio then takes center stage as they dance together and sing the chorus along with references to the artificiality of disguise, hints at cross-dressing, suggestions of shady street-artistic inspiration, and queer references, such as a character in a “lavender tuxedo.”14 The extravagant scene is replete with visual and spoken cues that translate all levels of camp sensibility and playfully evoke gender-bending and make-believe in a carnivalesque atmosphere that adds to the festivities and general anarchy of a scene where everything is pure spectacle. Then, when the viewer has become accustomed to seeing the revelers as participants and observers of the musical performance, the camera unexpectedly cuts to a balcony and Kenneth Harvey (Don Ameche), an aspiring classical composer from Kansas, smiling and clapping furiously. His dark suit stands out dramatically in contrast to the bright Mardi Gras costumes, and he now appears as part of an audience for whom this song and dance are performed. The camera then zooms back down to the dance floor and picks out Ziegfeld’s talent scout dressed in a bright lavender dress, as foretold by the song lyrics. As in all good camp, the transformation is never quite complete in playful “pantomime drag.”15 Very visibly, and comically, the scout’s blond wig recedes at the hairline to show his dark hair beneath, the tight-fitting dress constricts his movements, and he takes a few puffs of his cigar (an instant cue of masculinity) before making a beeline for Bonnie, whom he spots off in the distance. He is intercepted by Danny, who through exaggerated gestures expresses his irritation and invites “her highness” to dance, knowing full well that this is Ziegfeld’s talent scout. Such “garishly theatrical qualities,” as suggested by Roen and found in this scene, as in the film as a whole, “definitely fall under the heading of camp” (1: 10). The conversation underlines the fake femininity of the spy and the natural masculinity that is unmasked. At one point, the scout makes reference to the “gay music” that makes “her” so homesick, and as “she” tickles Danny flirtatiously with “her” feather boa, he responds, “Oh not here, Queen, in front of all these people.” The double entendre of this queer-charged exchange with the terms “gay” and “queen” draws attention to the multilevels of reading available to the viewers in a scene where both protagonists are aware of the theatricality of the other. The make-believe code is brutally disrupted by Danny’s dragging “her” away from the dance floor and out of the ballroom in perfect sync with the music, which stops as Ziegfeld’s talent scout goes down with a loud clatter offscreen.
Just when it appears that the musical number and its spectacle have come to an end, the band picks up the tempo with a clash of the cymbals as the camera now focuses on a curtain in the back of the hall that opens to reveal a stage where Miranda, on a small circular platform trimmed with deep-purple fur, is ready to perform, surrounded by her band and flanked on each side by golden fauns, naked from the waist up, who bear spears in a protective stance, creating yet another level of playful make-believe drawn from these mythological creatures. Fitting with the theme of the costume ball, the members of Miranda’s band are garbed with black-and-white striped harem pants, golden sashes at the waist, turbans, and felt jackets over bare torsos, evoking a Moroccan effect that adds to the scheme of the exotic that Miranda’s presence inevitably brings forth. These costumes coordinate beautifully with the colors of Miranda’s costume: she wears a stunning, narrow, glistening white skirt that drops to the floor, with a daring slit up the front; a skimpy black bodice with large white, frilly sleeves that protrude on each side; opulent white pearl bracelets; a headdress of white pom-poms piled high up on her head; and golden signature platform shoes. She performs in an upbeat yet infantilized style “I Like to be Loved by You,” accompanied by her band and the orchestra, to the great applause of the audience on the floor and in the balcony.16
The last segment of the costume-ball scene, equally saturated with camp, is a conversation between Bonnie and Kenneth in which Bonnie, still dressed as a showgirl with her excessively high party hat attached to her forehead, congratulates the wannabe composer Kenneth and insists he withdraw his concerto from Danny’s show to be played by the great composer Kavosky. The stylization of the whole conversation screams artificiality, culminating with Kenneth’s declaring to Bonnie, with the phallic party hat bobbing in front of his eyes, “I don’t feel right about this,” as Bonnie tries to convince him, in stark contrast to her comically inappropriate outfit, “let’s be practical.” She then segues into a deep, soulful rendition of “Whispering” that has already been played countless times throughout the musical and that she will repeat once again as a solo at the film’s finale, and their mutual entente is sealed by a long embrace, despite the obtrusive party hat.
Kenneth’s fascination and idealization with the presumably legendary conductor Kavosky (Emil Rameau) escalates as the film progresses and culminates in the film’s grand finale scene, the staging of Danny’s Greenwich Village Gaieties. Starstruck Kenneth appears giddy with delight as he watches Kavosky conducting his concerto as the opening number of the show with (taking a page out of Busby Berkeley’s book) no fewer than three grand pianos played simultaneously on the stage. Set against a fuchsia pink background, the color scheme announces Miranda’s costume as the stage slowly rotates and Miranda appears surrounded by her band. Given that the film is set in 1922, Miranda’s music and her band are particularly incongruous in all the scenes where they appear, but all the more so when contrasted with the classic “concerto” performed immediately before her final number. Without doubt one of Yvonne Wood’s most exquisite designs, Miranda’s black and fuchsia dress is trimmed with fur and features a skimpy black bodice designed in the shape of a large-petalled flower, which matches the black headdress made of plastic flowers.17 The slit at the front of the skirt opens to reveal black fishnet stockings and pink, black, and gold platform shoes. Her long sleeves end with bicolor gloves, and the pink on the palms emphasizes every hand twirl as she dances. It is an absolutely stunning outfit that invariably steals the show. Accompanied by her band, she sings “Give Me a Band and a Bandana,” miming the words as she sings, in an infantilized fashion, of her love for dressing up and singing and dancing. The contrast between her outfit and the words of the song adds to the incongruity of the number. As the lyrics declare, she doesn’t care for the “hootchy-cootchy” or like “the shimmy.” She wants her feet to be treated to “a tropical beat” and her hips “to say hip-hip-hooray.” Most importantly, she wants to show Manhattan her “Souse American tricks,” and her comical mispronunciation recalls her famous “South American Way” of her Broadway tenure and first Twentieth Century-Fox film, Down Argentine Way. The song segues into an upbeat samba medley, drawing from some of her most well-known songs: a substantial version of “O que é que a baiana tem?” followed by short musical phrases from a series of sambas.18 While the first part of her performance is high pitched and appears unnatural to Miranda’s repertoire, emphasized by her infantilized voice and exaggeratedly pained articulation of the English lyrics, as she moves into the samba interlude the tempo quickens, and she explodes into Portuguese, dancing and singing with great ease and gusto, appearing as always to be having a fabulous time, twirling around and swaying her skirt from side to side as she exposes her legs and dances to the accelerated tempo of the music. Imbued with camp sensitivity, the recall of her signature song is performed in an outfit that has evolved far from the original baiana costume. This scene, more than any of Miranda’s other segments, marks the disjuncture between the song and its North American mise-en-scène. This variation of “What does the baiana have?” is performed by the band asking the signature question and Miranda providing the responses in a role reversal from the song’s usual format, transposed to a sharper and more aggressive tone in both the questions and the answers. After Miranda repeats once again the chorus of “Give Me a Band and a Bandana,” her band disappears offstage as a bevy of chorus girls, dressed in short orange-frilled, hooped dresses and sombreros, enters and fills the scene, which opens onto a full stage as the orchestra continues to play the tune. The movements of the chorus girls seem unnatural as they dance forward, bending over at the waist with every other step and showing the tops of their sombreros to the audience, a movement later picked up again by the men who join them on the dance floor. A few overhead shots emphasize that the scene is “off” on several levels: the movements are repetitive and awkward, the orange and red colors clash with the bright pink of Miranda’s outfit that had established the color palette of the scene, and the geometric formations are neither precise nor spectacular enough to make a major impact. This segment ends with Miranda surrounded by chorines and chorus men repeating that she does not want romance but loves to dance. The final spoken words, “I love to dance!,” end the number in a childish register that points once again to “art for art’s sake”—very different from the core of the lightweight plot that is about to be resolved through romance. The curtain opens to reveal a platformed staircase flanked by a semicircle of elegant pillars and a balustrade where Bonnie Watson, dressed in a magnificent long, deep-blue gown, sings the last two verses of the film’s much-rehearsed theme tune, “Whispering.” Although performed on a stage, the song also doubles as a book number: at the song’s conclusion, the camera moves in one large, continuous sweep from the empty stage to behind the wings, where either the whole internal audience can see the love interests kissing or the camera suspends all possibility of make-believe to end the film with the plot’s romantic resolution. While Blaine does a pleasant enough job of carrying the lead North American female role, despite LeBaron’s attempt to establish her in the pantheon of Twentieth Century-Fox girls, she lacks the powerful voice and emotional display of either Alice Faye or Betty Grable. All in all, Seymour Felix’s choreography also lags far behind the spectacular nature of Busby Berkeley’s productions in The Gang’s All Here, even though camp is a consistent trait throughout the film.
Two other finale scenes from Carmen Miranda’s films merit particular note for their unequivocal camp qualities: “Samba-Boogie” in Something for the Boys (1944) and “Batucada” in If I’m Lucky (1946)—Miranda’s last film for Twentieth Century-Fox. The “Samba-Boogie” number, playing off the title of the well-known hit tune “Rhumboogie” first performed by the Andrews Sisters in Argentine Nights (1940) and made popular after that, is peculiar mainly because of Miranda’s most unusual costume. Rather than the long, tightfitting skirts the viewer is accustomed to seeing Miranda wear, she appears in tight purple shorts with a train attached at the back and a long-sleeved turquoise top. Her headdress is also unusual in that it bears plastic flowers and other indistinct objects. The characteristic bare midriff and platform shoes complete the look and are the two most distinctively “Miranda” aspects of the costume. Exposing Miranda’s bare legs, the shorts are rather unflattering on Miranda’s petite frame. Campiness also exudes from the bright combination of colors, and although the costume matches the two-toned pink/lavender color palette of the boys and the chorines who dance with her, the number lacks visual appeal. The pink/lavender combination is overused on the chorines’ polka-dot frills at their sleeves, trimmed bodices, and shoes and on the male dancers’ pink shirt tops, neckties, and lavender pants, and the scene lacks another, contrasting color for the viewers to rest their eyes. The lyrics of “Samba-Boogie” invite the audience to have fun and enjoy some entertainment by imitating South Americans, as Miranda sings: “If you want your kicks today / Just do it the Souse American Way . . . Do the Samba.” At this point, Miranda has definitely overdone the mispronunciation of her trademark saying and here rehearses the clichéd topic of wartime and postwar America’s dancing its way through bleak times by emulating its carefree, happy-go-lucky neighbors from the south. Other than Miranda’s presence, the spoken reference to the samba, and the drums that open the number and then reintroduce Miranda partway through the act, very little “samba” is present in the “Samba-Boogie,” which takes the form of a boogie-woogie swing style that in no way corresponds to the lyrics’ call to “take a touch of boogie-woogie out of the samba.” The incongruity between Carmen Miranda as the lead performer in this number and the song’s rhythm and choreography is striking. It causes Miranda to look awkwardly out of place despite giving it her characteristic dynamism and charisma, winking and smiling at the audience, affectionately touching the faces of the accompanying male dancers (with a constant twinkle in her eyes), twirling her hands as she spins around, and appearing throughout to be having, as always, a fabulous time in front of the camera. This finale number appears all the more uncharacteristic of Miranda’s typical performances when compared to her only other musical number in the film, “Batuca, nego,” a samba by Ari Barroso that she sings completely in Portuguese (despite a slight infantilization of her voice at the very end, more typical of her English songs) and for which she is dressed in one of her most stunning costumes: a long, shiny white skirt with layered ruffles at the front slit and green accents that match her green sequin-covered slim bodice, off-the-shoulder fluffy sleeves, golden jewelry wrapped around her neck and wrists, a typical fruit-laden headdress, and, draped across her back and over her forearms, a long white shawl with yellow pinstripes that picks up the yellow shirts and pin-striped pants worn by her accompanying band. In comparison to the “Batuca, nego” number, the “Samba-Boogie” has very few of the usual Miranda signature characteristics, and this juxtaposition adds to the incongruity of the film as a whole.
Carmen Miranda wearing Yvonne Wood’s exquisite creation for her final number of Greenwich Village (1944). Courtesy of the Margaret Herrick Library
In Carmen Miranda’s last film for Twentieth Century-Fox, If I’m Lucky (1946), the main musical number is the “Batucada,” which despite its Latin theme was written by Josef Myrow and Edgar de Lange. Although the film is in black and white, the print contrast is well defined, and the textures of the scene’s elements are sharp and visually appealing. Miranda’s all-white costume, designed by Sascha Brastoff, gave the media much to talk about, showcasing shredded plastic on the amazing hairpiece and on the adornments at her wrists and a ruffled, highly revealing skirt with a daring slit up the front, also covered with plastic trimmings. The textured and bejeweled costume, despite its lack of the usual bright colors, creates an impression of masquerade and exquisiteness, as had become expected with Miranda’s outfits. Against this white palette, Miranda’s dark hair, long polished nails, and expressive facial features stand out in stark contrast. When the number begins, Miranda appears from behind a shimmery curtain and, as she sings, proceeds to introduce each of the native Brazilian instruments, personifying them as she goes: the cabasa with its tummy-ache, the poor old cuíca, the squared tamborim that “lets out a scream,” alongside the regô-regô and the “pandero-thing.” Striking among the costumes on the set are the peculiar, incredibly camp hats that the male instrumentalists and dancers wear, including large squared and curved oversize-brimmed sombreros, tall pointed hats, thick cylinders, and multiple spikes, whereas the girls’ black-and-white hats, equally unusual, balance an arrangement of flowers protruding from a large bow on their heads. Camp permeates the set through the costume combinations that draw their inspiration from the black-and-white, curvy sidewalk that flanks Rio’s Copacabana beachfront and that is simulated on the stage floor, creating odd, very busy striped effects extending both horizontally across the floor and vertically up through the costumes. In this scene, the limited color palette of the black-and-white contrast “spills over” to embrace differences of textures, forms, and designs and plays with contrasting vertical, horizontal, curved, and straight lines. Harry James joins the number, intermittently performing trumpet solos or singing in response to Miranda’s call to do the “Batucada, the new Brazilian jive” as a large group of dancers fills the stage. This is followed by Miranda’s reappearing on top of a kettledrum illuminated from beneath and projecting light up Miranda’s legs and open skirt, as the shimmering background curtains at the deepest part of the stage appear to go up in flames—one effect sadly lost on the black-and-white print. With both James and Miranda on symmetrically placed kettledrums, the chorines and male chorus dance around them below, forming a sea of black-and-white movement that encircles the stars. The focus is on Miranda, and the male chorines dance around her with their phallic hats, devouring her with their emasculated gaze, their bare midriffs resonating with Miranda’s costume, all in all looking effeminate and asexualized, for they could certainly not be taken seriously in those costumes that are simply, in pure camp mode, “too much.” Although Miranda introduces the “Batucada” and segues into Portuguese lyrics, the rhythm remains a combination of swing and conga, with only the percussion instruments harking back to any authentic form of batucada. When James, from the top of his illuminated kettledrum, repeatedly sings the words “the batucada,” the Americanization of his pronunciation disavows all aspirations of genuine Brazilianness. The viewer’s eye has become saturated with camp, and one wonders where the scene could possibly go from here. Then the music quickens, and the bizarre camera work moves swiftly from overhead shots to knee-high views, creating unusual angles and adding new dimensions to the viewer’s perception of the stage. At this point of climax, as typical in the realm of camp, all aesthetic standards are “not only reversed, but also utterly discombobulated,” as Roen states. His phrase, “oftentimes, camp is something so bad that it’s good,” certainly applies here (2: 8). When the stylization could not possibly get any more obvious, James plays his trumpet, and Miranda responds in Portuguese, as though she is interpreting the music through her spoken words as the grand number comes to its end. Although this whole scene is set to the music of a big band, this is typical Carmen Miranda: stealing the show with her fabulous costume, engaging through her gestures and facial expressions with the dancers who accompany her and the internal and viewing public, all while projecting that she is having an absolutely fabulous time. While camp in musicals has often heightened its overall appeal through overripe Technicolor that saturates the color scheme, this atypical black-and-white scene is imbued with the camp effect of textures, unusual designs, unexpected camerawork, incongruous juxtapositions, and the extravagance of shapes and lines.
Among the ten films in which Miranda starred at Twentieth Century-Fox, the 1943 film The Gang’s All Here, directed by the great Busby Berkeley, the ultimate king of camp creation, is the film in which camp is most excessively portrayed. Miranda’s screen persona needs to be perceived in relation to the film as a whole to understand The Gang’s All Here as a cohesive, fabulously camp musical of its day.
The Gang’s All Here: Camp upon Camp
The Gang’s All Here (1943) was Carmen Miranda’s fourth film with Twentieth Century-Fox, and in it she plays a far more developed character than in any of her previous films. The time Miranda spends on camera equals that of Alice Faye, the film’s leading lady and the studio’s most prominent musical star, with whom Miranda carries the weight of the film. By the time Miranda starred in The Gang’s All Here, she was already a major pull at the box office, and the audience knew what to expect from her florid performances and lively acting. In The Gang’s All Here, she surpasses all expectations as she joins forces with the brilliant camera and stage management of Busby Berkeley.
When Berkeley arrived at Twentieth Century-Fox in 1943, he had already staged or directed over thirty major dance numbers and films at other Hollywood studios, among them some of the most spectacular musical dance numbers in film, such as Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933), Dames (1934), and Ziegfeld Girl (1941). Ziegfeld Girl staged an abundance of boas, feathers, and luxurious dresses that defy all description, incongruities that bring the audience from fish tanks to headdresses, and two scenes in particular that resonate with The Gang’s All Here: the anthological “Minnie from Trinidad” that was written explicitly for Judy Garland, in which she sings and dances to a calypso jive against a Caribbean setting, wearing pirate-style hooped earrings and a stuffed parrot on her shoulder while surrounded by chorus boys and girls; and the film’s grand finale, “You Stepped out of a Dream,” with its hallucinatory quality, in which showgirls parade and gyrate around the set in extravagant costumes created by Adrian and stacked high with feathers, sequins, baubles and pearls.19 Despite being filmed, regrettably, in black and white rather than the color the film longs for, all elements combine to anchor this Robert Z. Leonard box office hit and Busby Berkeley’s choreographies in the camp hall of fame.20 Yet in all his film experience, Berkeley had not worked with a dancer/performer as readily camp as Carmen Miranda. Judy Garland, while known as a very popular camp icon, is no doubt in the same league, but the difference between Miranda and Garland was that Miranda did not have to speak or act or take on a particular attitude to project camp—her visual aspect was already invested in camp sensitivity.
While all musicals project camp sensibility, the Berkeley musicals are in a category apart as the epitome of extravagant camp productions, and The Gang’s All Here may be the film most characteristic of his work. The plot involves several groups of professional entertainers, soldiers enlisted in the army, a two-timing boyfriend (played by James Ellison) who is engaged to his childhood sweetheart (Sheila Ryan) and falls in love with a singer (Alice Faye), and is largely inconsequential, yet the costumes, sets, and special effects are definitely best described as camp, foregrounding Carmen Miranda and her signature look. As in the majority of the Miranda musical numbers throughout her career at Twentieth Century-Fox, her performances in The Gang’s All Here are staged as aggregates to the film. The most iconic number of all, and the one that has received the most critical attention, is the unbelievably camp Berkeley extravaganza “The Lady in the Tutti Frutti Hat.” The difference between the “Tutti Frutti Hat” and Miranda’s previous numbers resides in the brilliant camera work and design and the magnitude of the dance number that are at the core of this risqué Berkeleyesque production. This segment contains many of Berkeley’s signature techniques: kaleidoscopic patterns, chorus girls, implied eroticism, daring camera swoops, bizarre angles, unstageable grandeur, and military formations. This is camera art at the height of Berkeley’s career, and the overall impression is both beautiful and uncanny, dizzying and dazzling. Berkeley’s photographic dexterity, combined with the electrifying colors of Technicolor and Miranda’s eye-popping performance, achieve extravagant effects. Martin Rubin summarizes Berkeley’s camera techniques as “spectacularizing the camera” (42). Behind Berkeley’s mind-boggling spectacle is the intuition and talent of an artist who creates visual art that the camera commands but that also makes its presence excessively and artificially apparent as it violates all realistic pretense in the name of exhilarating cinematic effects centered on Miranda.
“The Lady in the Tutti Frutti Hat” number opens on an internal audience watching an organ-grinder lead his monkey across the main floor toward the front of the stage, where the grinder coaxes the monkey to climb up a palm tree as the camera pulls back and reveals a row of trees, each with a monkey on top, projecting an uncanny sense of serialization and a preview of the identical chorus girls soon to appear on screen. The monkey’s climb draws the viewer’s eyes upward, a prelude to the scene’s outlandish verticality. Until this point, the transition from the narrative to the performance appears realistic, but a major shift in discourse is about to occur as the spectacle gets underway and the viewer, through an elegant camera sweep, is transported to the opulent setting of a tropical island of palm trees shading a bevy of chorus girls lying under the trees with their naked legs prominently exposed. With no specific geographic location, it is a never-never land, where everything becomes metaphorical. In contrast to their surroundings, and on another level of incongruity, the dehumanized, identically dressed chorus girls are closer to civilized nymphs than savage natives, transported to this idyllic dreamland of sand, sun, and palm trees that conveys an evasive state of mind. The paleness of the girls’ skin, in line with the interchangeable young, white, slender, and mostly blond chorines of the Ziegfeld Follies series, assures that what is represented are reproducible girls, with no individualized purpose other than to greet Miranda’s triumphant, bananafied entry, play a while, and then return to their starting positions to become once again part of the scenic display.21 Lucy Fischer provides a pertinent description when she refers to the “zombieism of the Berkeley girls, a quality that they exude beneath the surface of their opaque, dissociative grins” (76).
The initial freeing of the monkey becomes symbolic of the unleashing of the director’s imagination, and the passage that follows the monkey’s climb between the internal audience and the proscenium stage is essential to Berkeley’s ability to spectaculize the number, autonomous from the confines of the narrative and liberated from any constraints of realism. With Darryl F. Zanuck off at the warfront, the producer William LeBaron gave Berkeley free rein for directing the film, and the result is an unleashed, extravagant, opulent, and implicitly erotic feast for the war-weary moviegoers of the 1943 holiday season. Berkeley’s sense of the impossible, demonstrated in several of his previous movies, is magnified in the staging of the “Tutti Frutti Hat” number. Here, along with the size of the stage itself, the out-of-proportion camp effect comes from the choice of props used to emphasize the chorus girls’ movements: gigantic, “decidedly phallic,”22 plastic bananas and oversized strawberries that are carried around and lifted up and down in military fashion, forming suspiciously vulvar-shaped patterns, which one critic has pointedly referred to as a “garishly surreal masturbation fantasy” (Roen 1: 74), another “a sensuous slow motion rape” (Woll, Hollywood Musical 116). To be more precise, the dizzying effect of the opening and closing of human kaleidoscopic formations, suggestively penetrated by their companions’ oversized props, resembles a homo-erotic lesbian orgy. In this I echo Alexander Doty, who in his reading of women-dominated musical scenes sees “The Lady in the Tutti Frutti Hat” as “an all-woman group masturbation fantasy involving banana dildos and foot fetishism,” triggered by Carmen Miranda (13). What is truly amazing is that this scene passed the Production Code that explicitly prohibited costumes with “indecent or undue exposure” and dances “suggesting or representing sexual actions or indecent passion” (Belton 140).23 This scene defies all heteronormative display, providing a playground for erotica fantasies projected onto an undetermined elsewhere. While certain critics have viewed this scene as an imaginary expression of imperial sexual domination,24 I suggest that, on the contrary, the coded messages of the chorines’ banana-laden performance and the lack of an “exploiter” in this stand-alone scene endow Miranda with the last laugh. After all, similar to the chorus girls who gratify themselves without the presence of potentially seductive men, Miranda, the Latin queen of this make-believe tropical island, reigns supreme as she literally towers over her land and subjects, removed from Western domination, the sexual/sensual self-sufficiency running parallel to its ethnic counterpart.
Carmen Miranda in her oxen-driven cart surrounded by her band in The Gang’s All Here (1943). Courtesy of www.doctormacro.com
The music is likewise dwarfed by the overwhelmingly visual aspect of the number and adds to the overall childish effect.25 The only materializations of male presence are the servants who accompany Miranda as she enters, riding on a cart drawn by two golden-painted oxen. These men are more akin to emasculated eunuchs carrying an empress than to virile men willing to seduce or be seduced by an eager group of chorus girls. After all, by analogy, they enter with a pair of oxen, which are well known as commonly castrated draft animals.
Miranda’s costume is in one of her typical eye-catching dresses, with the usual over-the-top jewelry and platform shoes. What distinguishes this fabulous Yvonne Wood creation from Miranda’s previous outfits is the more simple, streamlined, tricolor design: a black sequin-covered dress, with red strawberries and yellow bananas in her headdress. The darkness of her dress contrasts with the light-colored set, a background of light sand and blue skies, and coordinates with the chorus girls’ black and yellow costumes consisting of black off-the-shoulder bustier tops with yellow scarves and very short flouncy skorts. The chorines’ bare midriffs recall Miranda’s signature design, but the long, naked legs infantilize their look in contrast to Miranda’s elegant black flowing skirt. Miranda’s striking black, red, and yellow costume has a grounding effect, as the long, shaped skirt and headdress emphasize vertical lines and contrast with the short, frilled skorts of the chorus girls.
Berkeley’s camera transforms the dance routines and movements into enormous displays of geometric formations and kaleidoscopic shapes through a constantly changing perspective as close-ups, pullbacks, and aerial shots add depth and height to the performance. The chorus girls wave the giant bananas up and down, back and forth to form undulating archways and tunnels and hypnotic waves, reminiscent of Berkeley’s signature “writhing snake” effect. The mechanical movements of the chorus girls, momentarily forgotten beneath their gigantic props, lose their humanity, only to regain it seconds later when the camera focuses in on the girls as it moves down the line, contrasting their sameness with unexplored individuality. Toward the end of the number, the camera hovers over the girls lying on the sand, their legs slightly open, in a final sweep that toys with exposure and is suggestive of eroticism.
Drawing extensively from Laura Mulvey’s classic text “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” film critics have noted that as a genre of spectacle, the musical represents sexual difference through clear asymmetry in the production numbers, reinforcing the voyeuristic position of a male spectator. On the one hand, this holds true for “The Lady in the Tutti Frutti Hat,” which illustrates, not to say exploits, the blatant display of the female body through Berkeley’s trademark overhead camera shots of women arranged to form abstract patterns that epitomize the genre’s ability to eroticize the female body, fragmenting and fetishizing it. On the other hand, a camp reading complicates this voyeuristic pleasure that objectifies the female body through a presumed male gaze since, as noted above, a more exact interpretation of the scene is the female’s sexual self-sufficiency that elides the male altogether. Central to this understanding is Miranda’s position as the lead singer and only vocalist, and also the number’s main visual interest. Even before the final shot, Miranda dominates the scene. She is featured as royalty among the maidens: she enters in a position of superiority in the oxcart and remains central to the geometric designs that form around her, culminating with the circular banana-xylophone that she plays with gusto from the center of a circle of chorus girls. López argues that while Miranda is held as both a sexual and an ethnic fetish, she embodies the pleasures of the voyeuristic gaze, but she also “acknowledges and openly participates in her fetishization, staring back at the camera” (77). In comparison to the chorus girls, who look obliquely at the camera or are filmed from the side, Miranda stares straightforward from the center of the frame, and we experience her brilliantly camp performative wink. Miranda engages with the audience, lets them in on her secret that she is an accomplice in the staging of the act (after all, doesn’t she sing about her hat being too high?). As she beckons to the viewers with seductive come-hither gestures, she entices them to come closer to the action, to participate in the act while remaining separate from the spectacle. Whereas the lyrics in Miranda’s Hollywood-produced songs are mostly devoid of purposeful meaning, “The Lady in the Tutti Frutti Hat” problematizes what has typically been considered the availability of the foreign female and adds a new angle to Miranda’s self-parody: if on the one hand she must take off her hat to kiss a guy (something she apparently did once for “Johnny Smith,” the allegorical North American, who was “very happy with the lady in the tutti frutti hat”), the hat creates a barrier from prying male seducers; then on the other hand, the glide from gentlemen expecting an acquiescent “Sí, sí” to Miranda’s outdoing them through an acculturated “Yes, sir-ee!” portrays Miranda’s agency as she renegotiates the terms of their relationship and teasingly warns with an insinuating “ay, ay!” that there could be consequences to removing her hat.26 In The Gang’s All Here, Carmen Miranda also participates in “self-othering” by singing about the “Americanos,” creating a distinction between her/them. Referring to herself in the third person as “the lady in the tutti frutti hat” plays with Miranda’s self-awareness of her star image, which she justifies through her insistence that she dresses gaily. These lyrics also circle back on themselves with a dizzying rhyme: “Some people say I dress too gay / But evr’y day I feel so gay / And when I’m gay, I dress this way / Is something wrong with that?” She then immediately answers her own rhetorical question with a screechy, infantilized “no-oh!” This is another song of Miranda’s Hollywood repertoire that filters camp sensitivity into the lyrics, not only through the ambiguity of the lady’s position as willing/unwilling sexual or sensual prey, but also in the different levels of “gayness” that the staging of costume and lyrics indicate. Mandrell sidesteps an interpretation of the lyrics as beckoning “all queers to dress up and come out to play” (34), yet the reinforced “gayness” of the scene opens the possibility of multilayered readings, including a queer one.
With The Gang’s All Here, Berkeley directed his first Technicolor musical but brought back to the screen some of the effects and geometric formations that he had used successfully in previous black-and-white films.27 The addition of color in the case of “The Lady in the Tutti Frutti Hat” softens the psychedelic sensation produced by the black-and-white effects in Dames (1934), for example, while at the same time creating intense whirling and dehumanized formations when the chorus girls brandish their oversized strawberries and bananas. These large props are a staple of the musical film and date back to the vaudeville tradition of bringing objects to the stage that could easily be distinguished from the audience. What Berkeley achieves in his numbers is a mass production of these gigantic objects, which amplifies their effect and creates new perspective possibilities through the camera movement. In the above-mentioned scene, the enormous bananas form lines of swaying configurations that the eye becomes accustomed to seeing, Berkeley upturns the viewer’s sense of proportion to the point that when the camera cuts to the smaller, wooden, banana-made xylophone, it looks miniature in comparison. The oversized props dwarf the chorus girls, who sidestep along the sand in unison, inching forward on a small scale, typical of Berkeley’s choreographies, which usually involve walking, turning, bending, and swaying but very little actual dancing, as the camera does the fancy “footwork.” The militarized movements of the chorines’ feet is a new twist on the Berkeley classic “parade of faces.” While, typically, the camera focuses on a line of chorines marching directly up to the camera, or the camera toward them, here this is replaced by the movement of the naked feet.28 After the chorines finish swaying their props rhythmically up and down, they break out of their impeccably straight lines as though responding to an inaudible command and abandon the bananas as they scramble back to recline under the palm trees in their initial positions. The shrill cry that they emit seems animalesque in nature, reversing back in time, as though hypnotized by some unseen force that controls their orchestrated movements and sudden departure. The segment comes to its end now that playtime is over and the chorus girls (gratified? or simply exhausted?) have returned to the sandy mound under the palm trees.29
In “The Lady in the Tutti Frutti Hat,” the girls’ whistles, the chattering of the monkeys, and the organ-grinders’ kinetic music all resonate within the same register—a screechy, high-pitched acoustical sound that becomes the backdrop for Miranda’s vocal performance. Throughout the scene, the staging projects camp performativity with incongruous juxtapositions: beautiful and bizarre, preposterous and enchanting. The scene aspires to leave the audience in a daze of disbelief, wondering where the cinematic journey could possibly go after such a lavish fantasy of imaginative effects. This self-contained, eye-popping extravaganza, the work of Berkeley’s choreographic and cinematic brilliance and photographic dexterity, has given the film its longevity as a classic among the 1940s musicals. What one critic writes about the film in general is also applicable to this number: “It’s colossal, it’s stupendous, and one of the artiest productions ever made. And because of all this and in spite of its extraordinary talent, it’s a little tiring.”30
As the camera returns to the climbing monkey that introduced the segment, the number has come full circle in typical Berkeley style, with the reminder that there is an internal audience, here expressed by the chorus girls and the monkey back in their initial positions.31 The audience finally relaxes from the visual overstimulation, only to be taken by surprise when the camera returns to the stage that, in a camp-tsunami aftershock, is now completely dominated by a gigantic bunch of bananas, extending ad infinitum from the top of Miranda’s head to fill the whole stage and beyond. There could not be a more appropriate conclusion to this phenomenally florid musical: through a visual trick which combines Carmen’s turban and a painted backdrop, she stands immobile at the deepest point of the stage flanked by two rows of gigantic strawberries made out of placard cutouts. If “the hallmark of Camp,” to draw from Sontag, “is the spirit of extravagance” (59), this ultimate headdress of the “Tutti Frutti Hat” number is the hallmark of all Miranda’s headdresses. As Caetano Veloso states, in this image Miranda becomes “the goddess of camp,” and “the bananas coming out of the top of her head . . . are confirmation of a deity.”32 This is the Miranda headdress par excellence, outdoing all those that came before it and never to be surpassed afterwards. Nor could it ever be equaled: the impossibility of the scale, the repeated motif of the banana, the final unsuccessful trompe l’oeil effect—all combine to create the ultimate camp illustration that is both disturbing and spectacular. The integration of the two-dimensional placards with Miranda and this three-dimensional space is disorienting. After watching gigantic three-dimensional props moved around the stage in hallucinatory formations, there is something unsettling about this forced combination of dimensions, and the reversal to two-dimensional props seems ironically passé in comparison to the oversized bananas and strawberries that the viewer has become accustomed to seeing. The two-dimensional props appear blatantly unreal and disturbingly camp. Indeed, this image, perhaps more than any other associated with Carmen Miranda, is the quintessence of camp. While the viewer attempts to attribute meaning to this visual finale, after the overstimulation of bananaland fantasia, the banana headdress is devoid of any real meaning for an audience whose senses of proportion and reality have been numbed. Just as everything and everyone is back in its place at the end of the number, the narrative has likewise not progressed and is exactly where we left off before this lengthy escape to the fantastic land of Miranda and her chorines, proving that the scene, purposely devoid of narrative relevance, was pure spectacle.
While much has been written about “The Lady in the Tutti Frutti Hat” scene and the final image of Miranda dwarfed by her gargantuan headdress that dominates the frame, it is important to link this epic number to the film’s other “impossible” cinematic moments. “There is little modulation in The Gang’s All Here: it is like a control console on which every dial is turned up to Maximum . . . constituting Berkeley’s most sustained achievement of imposing the spectacle style across the entirety of a feature film” (Rubin 161). In the film’s opening scene, as the passengers of the SS Brazil disembark onto a dock at New York’s waterfront, the camera features prize commodity imports such as sugar and coffee and then scans the height of an opulent cargo net bursting with tropical fruits of all kinds, which then becomes none other than Miranda’s headdress. The well-established association, both on and off the screen, of Miranda with fruit is immediately projected in this preliminary scene, along with the impossibility of scale, as the camera pulls back to reveal that the SS Brazil is in fact part of an enormous stage, and Miranda is a singer in this opening performance. This unexpected change of perspective that Berkeley creates is unsettling and happens so quickly that the viewer barely has time to rethink scale and context before the scene has moved on to introduce Miranda’s first number. The lively beat of the opening music accompanies the camera work’s accelerated pace and sends a clear message that the show is pushing forward and this disorientation of scale and perspective is just the beginning. The large hamper of mixed tropical fruit descends, and the seamless transition to Miranda’s hat rehearses the verticality of her image as a preview to the tutti-frutti hat. Through skillful camera work, the hamper dissolves into a small-brimmed hat with an assortment of a few dainty fruits, completing Miranda’s “Minnie-Mouse” look with her black hair coiffed in two small buns over her ears, contrasting with the bright red of her lipstick and headscarf, scintillating gold and silver jewelry on her arms and around her neck, and the signature platform shoes. In this scene, as in the “Tutti Frutti Hat” number, the camera’s visual effects and the spectacular color assortment fill the stage, taking prominence over the music and lyrics. The fact that the scene is New York, and a staged scene at that, has no bearing on the plot. As in all Berkeley’s great productions, spectacle is the core of the film, with little regard, need, or space for the narrative passages that are “greatly denaturalized” and to a certain extent “de-narrativized” (Rubin 161). The narrative is merely a vehicle to showcase some of Berkeley’s finest work, and Miranda enables his “perfectly dreadful and totally fascinating aberration” (T. Sennett 180). In this number, as in “The Lady in the Tutti Frutti Hat,” there is a disturbing, almost vertiginous vying between narrative and spectacle. Despite verbal and visual reminders postspectacle (such as the proscenium curtain) that what the viewer has just experienced was intended as a staged production, the fluidity between the performance and the devalued narrative disturbs common points of theatrical reference. Miranda in particular facilitates the flowing together of the different spaces as she continues to wear her stylized, eye-popping costumes in the film’s narrative space.
As the film progresses, the typical curtain separating the narrative from the performative space disappears, and in the grand finale it is turned literally upside down by an ascending/descending water fountain that rises at the conclusion of a number and comes down at the beginning, as though the diminished narrative space and the spectacle have changed places.33 This grand finale is a companion scene to “The Lady in the Tutti Frutti Hat” number, and it constitutes the second mega-Berkeleyesque sequence with a musical trio-combo: “Paducah” / “Polka Dot Polka” / “A Journey to a Star,” which features Miranda during the third variation of “Paducah,” following the orchestral rendition and Benny Goodman’s singing. As the Hollywood Reporter enthusiastically summarizes: “The ending is sheer camera magic, a kaleidoscopic creation by Busby Berkeley who stages a startling departure in finales with intricate turntable and mirrored devices.”34 At this point in the film, it has become clear that the spectacular performances have displaced the loosely connected narrative scenes of jovial misunderstandings and bland love interests despite the impressive cast of supporting players who, along with Miranda, include Edward Everett Horton, Eugene Pallette, and Charlotte Greenwood. The “stacking” of musical numbers at the end of the film was characteristic of Berkeley’s films at Warner Brothers, although not without exceptions. In The Gang’s All Here, placing “The Lady in the Tutti Frutti Hat” in the first half of the film creates an early climax, but the grand finale is just as cinematically lavish and reiterates the message, loud and clear, that this film is all about the spectacular.
Dismissing any attempt to resolve the ongoing quid-pro-quo romantic storyline, the last part of the film is engulfed by excessive and purely delightful musical segments blurring one into the next through an explosion of color, movement, and emotions and pushes the limits of technical creativity, leaving behind all sensation of realism, as the hyperspectacularized numbers no longer even refer back to an “excuse” of a narrative. The musical numbers become self-sufficient, and their isolation from the rest of the plot is symbolically suggested by the above-mentioned ascending/descending water fountains that enclose the performers and are brilliantly filmed with a touch of fuchsia, which adds another layer of whimsical magic to the scene’s construction. The clear-cut and elegant lines of the bright-white garden statue and the classical violinist trio set the tone for what is to be an upper-class, high-quality musical performance.
The “Paducah” number is a typical 1940s swing affair. It is performed first by Benny Goodman’s orchestra, whose musicians Berkeley’s camera individualizes as it sweeps along the rows, recalling the close-ups of chorus girls and organ-grinder lines. The next movement is a solo by Benny Goodman, with camera work that showcases the sumptuous gold curtains with their green accents. This creates the backdrop for Miranda’s grand entrance: dressed in white but with a fabulous red headdress and elegant flared skirt, with gold necklaces and bracelets that adorn her chest and arms and reverberate off the exquisite gold backdrop. Miranda looks spectacular, as she has throughout the film, always appearing sumptuously dressed and beautifully coordinated. After her solo number, Tony De Marco and Miranda’s band, Bando da Lua, join her on the stage and bring the popular sound of Latin music and quickstep dance movements to this cornucopia of sensations, color, and talent that continuously fills the frame.
The swing band’s upbeat tempo gives way to a fabulous display of singing and dancing to several variations on a reprise of “A Journey to a Star,” with Alice Faye as the main singer. Then, when it would seem that the grand finale has reached its peak, saturated with talent, color, and emotions, the scene leads to a truly bizarre period production in which redheaded, freckled children fill the frame as they dance in couples to the tune of the “Polka Dot Polka.” In a production that has revolved consistently around adults, the sudden introduction of children this late in the film appears terribly out of place, camp in and of itself, and harks back to Berkeley’s manipulation of the viewers’ sense of perspective, so prominently displayed in “The Lady in the Tutti Frutti Hat.” The disorienting effect is amplified by the unusual designs of the children’s costumes, covered with polka dots and circles. These fabrics recall the circle motif of Miranda’s strawberries and the constant circular motions that Berkeley weaves throughout all the musical numbers (the kaleidoscopic designs, the circular wooden xylophone, the organ-grinders, the repetitive lyrics and musical phrases), serving as a prelude to the explosion of circles in the following segment. The lyrics of the song “Polka Dot Polka” emphasize the absurd and contrived correspondence between the polka dance and the polka dot, with the chorus lamenting the end of the dance and the future of the dot. In typical camp free-association style (Core 7), the camera focuses in on one of the dancing children’s sleeve. Immediately, the camera cuts to a similar sleeve that now appears, most uncannily, to drape a marble-like white hand. Without pause, the camera drags the viewer from the polka dot of the detached sleeve through a psychedelic tunnel to a neon hoop, all in a mesmerizing whirlwind of visual connections.35 The audience is now dismissed, and the viewer, forced to journey to the next segment alone, loses all references to reality, both from within or beyond the musical sequence of numbers that will eventually couch the scene and provide the reassurance that this one-way tunnel is indeed ephemeral theatricality. It is as though the audience, beguiled through the infantilized “Polka Dot Polka,” with its deceivingly nonsensical and inconsequential lyrics, is now experiencing the not-so-innocent prediction that the “polka is passé, but the dot is here to stay.” The sequence has removed the polka (the children, the dancing, the guiding role of Alice Faye, and all other recognizable actors), and all that remains is abstraction in its purest of forms. This fantasia of Technicolor geometry resembles a science-fiction number avant la lettre, as indistinguishable chorus girls in full-length bodysuits pass hoops one to the other with military precision in a scene that is pure spectacle but divested of spectacular grandeur. Far different from the hyperfeminized, chirping maidens of the exotic “Tutti Frutti Hat” segment, these chorines are desexualized through their unisex dress and mechanized by their automated gestures, more akin to an army of programmable Martians, and once again no male dancers appear in this trademark Berkeley feminine space. The scene creates a hypnotizing sensation, bordering on the animalesque, as the nonrepresentational performers, standardized in their cold-hued blue costumes, create patterns of encoded language, with the visual focus on the brightly lit neonized hoops. Whereas the bright, visually pleasant colors of the “Tutti Frutti Hat” sequence focus on warm hues of green, yellow, red, and black with a hint of brown, the hoops/disk scene is designed in the disturbingly cold and dark neon colors of a nightclub, with flashes of fuchsia that hark back to the gentle-toned lighting of the Sheila Ryan/Tony De Marco dance duet but are now rearticulated as brusque, aggressive, and unnatural. Both scenes are imbued with camp dramatic quality, but while the Miranda banana-fantasia leans toward a tropical escapist outlet, the hoop finale is futuristic and anachronistically displaced, resonating with Core’s assertion of camp’s existence in the future, which doubles back and needs the present so badly (15), even when this present entails no bearings of reality. Only the agents of spectacle remain to produce their art in the absence of explicit viewers. The décor is pure Berkeley technique: an abstract and ambiguous fantasyland, the last stop in a fluid progression of spatial metamorphoses.36 The camera dominates the scene as hoops transform into disks, turn, and rise through reverse-motion technique, once again destabilizing the viewers’ notion of reality through obscure camera angles and perspectives.37 It is significant that, in particular, the film’s main star, Alice Faye, becomes spectacularized as she is literally engulfed by a twirling cape that itself transforms into yet another dizzying, color-filled, and voluptuous kaleidoscopic design. There is no vying for space between narrative and spectacle: even the cast members are now mere bearers of unbelievable visual effects as the borders between both spaces collapse. The actors only reappear for the final curtain-call with the head of each cast member disembodied and set against a disk of a different color and texture as they float toward the camera and sing a line of the by then over-used “A Journey to a Star.”38 As the first line is hoarsely sung, croaked even, by Eugene Pallette, it is clear that the spectacle has become a parody of itself, reusing and adulterating the song out of context in this uncomfortable merging of actors and spectacle, forcibly “off” and indistinguishably camp. The actors have become homogenized as part of the spectacle, further adding to the campiness of the scene by themselves representing “stars” in the sky, all smiling and singing inside of their own brightly colored disks. The finale provides a symbolic resolution to the storyline, by now long forgotten, as Alice Faye’s and John Payne’s disks gravitate toward each other to be reunited as the number concludes. The film has come full circle: the technique of the disembodied head initiated with Aloísio de Oliveira’s singing “Brasil” against the backdrop of a disk in the opening number is now multiplied and extended to embrace all the cast, sending the final message that it is, after all, nothing but a spectacle. Miranda’s placement directly below Alice Faye and John Payne in the final scene is a symbolically charged positioning that confirms her importance in the film in general, but most notably, in the spectacle. With the film’s ending on a “star”-filled sky, it has evolved into a collage of juxtaposed images of shape and color that have literally overcome gravity, just as the hoops and disks had previously, and have symbolically overruled the narrative—its conditions and its limits—which is, after all, what Miranda’s spectacle was all about.
Beyond the two megaspectacular numbers, the “Tutti Frutti Hat” number and the grand finale “Paducah”/ “Polka Dot Polka” / “A Journey to a Star” combo, what makes The Gang’s All Here one of the most camp films of all time is the sustained hypertheatricality that dominates the film through the audaciously spectacular musical numbers, the centrality of flamboyant Carmen Miranda, and the overabundance of specialty acts by Tony De Marco; Phil Baker (playing himself); Benny Goodman and his orchestra (also in true character); the ever-popular, amusing, and witty Charlotte Greenwood; and the comic, fussbudget, ineffectual character actor Edward Everett Horton. The film is saturated with “incongruous juxtapositions” that oppose, as Newton explains, “high and low status, youth and old age, profane and sacred functions or symbols, cheap and expensive articles . . . frequently used for camp purposes” (107) and frequently projected by the awkward sidekick characters’ screen presence. Charlotte Greenwood’s character (Mrs. Potter) has several memorable scenes that draw from this camp aesthetic, such as when she dances with a young jitterbug and steals the show with her elongated side and front kicks, or when, as the hostess of the manor, her orange and white striped dress matches the same tones as the house’s awning, causing the viewer to do a double-take at this bizarrely “off” coordination. Likewise, Edward Everett Horton’s character (Mr. Potter) is found repeatedly and unintentionally in compromising situations with the much younger Dorita, played by Miranda. Part of the camp appeal of Miranda’s stage persona stems from her being simultaneously marginalized and ubiquitous, as theorized by Booth (11). She is central to the film’s plot, in which she is both mocked and celebrated through her type casting as unique, foreign, and more utterly over-the-top than in any of her other screen roles.
Understandably, as a film artist Miranda did eventually tire of playing the role of the Hollywood baiana, which is memorably portrayed in The Gang’s All Here and repeated throughout her films made under contract with Twentieth Century-Fox. As illustrated throughout this discussion of Miranda’s films, these segments provocatively and purposely disrupt the films’ narrative flow, couching the film experience in an overwhelming “here and now” of the performed spectacle (Mellencamp 3). A camp reading allows us to make greater sense of Miranda’s image: taking as our premise that camp provokes all notions of gender normality through parody and excessive theatricality of style, we can see how Carmen Miranda’s stage image, by disrupting the relations of form to content and through elements emphasized and repeated in her films and extrafilmic publicity material, almost immediately became a camp icon. To perceive Carmen Miranda as a producer of camp and as a camp object opens a more positive relationship between the camp spectator and Miranda’s images of female excess. This undermines and challenges the presumed naturalness of gender roles, and by this account, Carmen Miranda’s playful and flamboyant stylization becomes a powerful tool for critique rather than a mere affirmation of stereotypical Latinidade and oppressive images of women. These readings of Miranda’s films contribute to a better understanding of her performative wink, an analytical tool necessary to navigating these camp sights of excess, artifice, and theatricality, which decades after her death keep her star text alive.
