Product Description

Her girl-next-door looks combined with a sultry singing voice made Alice Faye one of Hollywood's biggest stars in the Golden Age of Cinema.

Eadie Allen (Alice Faye) is a chorus girl who dreams of becoming a star. While working at a New York nightclub, she meets Sergeant Andy Mason (James Ellison); they fall in love but he is shipped off to war. As Eadie becomes the headliner at the nightclub, Andy comes home a war hero. But complications arise when Eadie finds out Andy is unofficially engaged to another woman. It's up to Eadie's friend and nightclub co-star Dorita (Carmen Miranda) to set things straight. The Gang's All Here is filled with leggy chorus dancers and lavish musical production numbers including Faye's flashy neon finale "The Polka Dot Polka."

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #70775 in DVD
• Brand: TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX HOME ENT
• Released on: 2007-02-20
• Rating: Unrated
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Formats: Color, Dolby, DVD, Full Screen, NTSC
• Original language: English, Portuguese
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: 1.00 pounds
• Running time: 103 minutes

Amazon.com
Here's one of Hollywood's great excursions into surrealism: The Gang's All Here, the legendarily over-the-top wartime musical. Director Busby Berkeley threw every demented idea that every swirled out of his teeming brain into this madcap affair, and decades later the film was still wowing 'em as a campy jaw-dropper.

The plot is the nonsensical stuff of homefront musicals, with chorus girl Alice Faye waiting for soldier boy James Ellison to return from the war, little knowing he is engaged to another woman. But the real point here is the crazy production design and the flabbergasting numbers--most famously, Carmen Miranda's "The Lady in the Tutti-Frutti Hat," which includes a chorus line of women dancing while holding giant bananas over their heads. It might have been dreamed up by Salvador Dali after an acid trip. Alice gets her due with the equally crazy "Polka-Dot Polka," and Benny Goodman and his orchestra are also around. So are such reliable second bananas (you should excuse the expression) as Edward Everett Horton and high-kicking Charlotte Greenwood.

The DVD extras include a 20-minute documentary on Berkeley's peculiar art, plus a charming 25-promotional film featuring Alice Faye reminiscing about her old pictures and extolling the virtues of physical fitness (made for the Pfizer drug company while Faye was their spokesperson). A deleted comedy scene and two episodes from the long-running radio show Faye did with husband Phil Harris are also included. The print itself is a source of controversy; the colors lack the "pop" of the original Technicolor, and the film looks dimmer and vaguer than its original glory. Here's hoping a cleaner, fuller version will emerge. --Robert Horton

Customer Reviews

Way over the top
20th Century Fox please release this film on DVD!!!

The first time I saw this movie I laughed so hard I nearly made
myself sick. This film starts off with an over the top production number "Brazil/You Discover Your In New York" which
makes you think that nothing in the film can ever get more campy. Alice Faye comes in with a couple of great numbers-
"A Journey to a Star" and "No Love, No Nothin'." But fasten your
seat belts because Carmen Miranda and Busby Berkley are about to
bring you "The Lady In the Tutti-Fuity Hat." This is easily one
of the most over the top musical numbers ever put on film. The
number is supposed to be on nightclub stage that must the size
of a small town. Bananas are everywhere including chorus girls
dancing with giant bananas!! At the end of the number a close-up
of Carmen keeps pulling back to reveal Carmen's hat with an endless stream of bananas flowing out and Carmen surrounded by
giant strawberries! Edward Everret Horton and Charlotte Greenwood are on hand to add to insanity. Then to top it off
Alice ends the film with "The Polka-Dot Polka" which brings to
mind Busby's "Shadow Waltz." In "Shadow Waltz" he used neon violins in this number he uses what look to be neon hoolahoops!
On any level the film is a prime example of a director who just
doesn't no where to stop. This isn't a classic Hollywood musical
but it is top notch Hollywood Camp!

Huge Disappointment for Fans of "Gang"
20th Century Fox Home Entertainment has been turning out some first-rate discs lately, exemplified by last week's release of "The Mr. Moto Collection, Volume 2," the final release in the studio' Mr. Moto series. The Moto films, atmospheric tales of international intrigue starring Peter Lorre as a vaguely Asian adventurer, again look sharp, clear and solid in Fox's transfers.

But something has gone horribly wrong with "The Alice Faye Collection," a four-disc set of Fox musicals including one of the studio's crown jewels: "The Gang's All Here," Busby Berkeley's psychedelic Technicolor extravaganza of 1943. The original Technicolor separation negatives were destroyed in the 1980s at a time when Fox was trying to purge its library of nitrate film elements, and the movie was transferred to an Eastman Color internegative on safety stock. The Eastman material has since faded, producing dark, heavy tones. Fox's engineers have apparently made an attempt to brighten the colors digitally, only to have the pigments look flat and pale.

The results, as in the celebrated giant bananas number starring the unforgettable Carmen Miranda, are disappointing and even grotesque; those big bananas are a washed-out tan color rather than the original, eye-popping yellow.

The other films in the set - Irving Cummings's Technicolor "That Night in Rio" (1941); Mr. Cummings's black-and-white biopic "Lillian Russell" (1940); and Roy Del Ruth's adaptation of Irving Berlin's "On the Avenue" - look somewhat better, though "Avenue" shows serious print damage throughout.

But "The Gang's All Here" represents another great film lost, this time right under our noses. We, and the studio libraries, ought to know better by now.

Took over 20 years to get this onto video!
AT LAST.

Fox never released this surreal film on VHS (why!?), and so it became one of those Holy Grail films that movie buffs have been waiting for (it was released on laserdisc ages ago, though I know of no one who actually owns it). It's great that we are finally getting the DVD.

Was lucky to see this in a theater in NYC 2 years ago, where the crowd loved every minute of it--especially the antics of Carmen Miranda. It does have the dumbest script of any musical I can think of, which is really saying something--especially when you consider other Fox wartime musicals.

On the big screen it LOOKS amazing: the color, the art direction, the costumes, the choreography, the neon hoops, the bananas. (UPDATE: Just watched the DVD--and sadly the color is not replicated very well...the print I saw was much, much richer than this. Oh well.)

How can you not love a movie where the whole cast is washed away by a fountain of purple water at the fade out? I'm not kidding.

Thank you Fox, Thank you.