The gaudy palette of Busby Berkeley’s vertiginous Technicolor musical, from 1943, inspired the director’s most extravagant visual inventions, starting with a musical number done in long, swooping takes running from a dark soundstage to a shipyard that turns out to be the colossal set of a Manhattan night club where Carmen Miranda and her tutti-frutti hat hold sway. (newyorker.com)

Busby Berkeley (1895-1976) was an American motion-picture director and choreographer who was noted for the elaborate dancing-girl extravaganzas that he created on film. Using innovative camera techniques, he revolutionized the genre of the musical in the Great Depression era. (britannica.com)

Carmen Miranda, who plays Dorita in the film and, although we have yet to meet the other female cast members, already it is evident that Miranda is the “one” to watch. (Constance Cherise)

An outdoor bash to sell war bonds offers eye-catching dances, but Berkeley’s virtuosity is more than ornamental. He is, in effect, a sociobiologist, whose production numbers connect social behavior to instinctual drives—sometimes gloriously blatantly, as in a famous scene with giant bananas. In the finale, the characters kaleidoscopically dissolve into an erotic whirl of color, presenting personality as merely the human face of inhuman forces. (newyorker.com)

Miranda went on to skyrocketing stardom in America during the 1940s in a plethora of propaganda films, full of romanticized exotic locals were released, during its Good Neighbor Policy, attempting to sway South America into alignment. Propaganda films, generally used to promote political causes, were vehicles where messages were interwoven into the script, subtlety dictating the manor in which Americans should view their fighting soldiers and declare their allegiance to their country. (Constance Cherise)

The blend of patriotic sentiment and ecstatic frenzy suggests that the freedom for which Sergeant Mason and his cohorts are fighting is, above all, sexual.(The Quad; April 14)

The two sides dance alongside each other in a dance of harmonious elegance and emotion. this dance is not only witnessed by us, but also by the characters of the film. it's their resort to flee away from the aching absences or emptiness within. it's a realm of expressing the pain accumulated, and a realm of unity among the people who have experienced the same. the laughs in store are effective, but it's this sense of liberation that makes this movie excel. (Vidyuth Mahesh)

Andy’s father decides to throw the ultimate bash in welcoming his son home, inviting Eadie and her dance troupe to perform, where Andy’s fiancee is also attending, placing him in a difficult predicament. (Constance Cherise)

Busby Berkeley defied the stage-bound conventions of movie musicals and used camera angles and movements that would be impossible to experience as a spectator sitting in the audience. His signature was placing the camera directly above the action to show his ensemble of performers moving in precise geometric formations. The armies of chorus girls he used, though, were chosen primarily for their beauty, not for their dancing ability. Berkeley took full advantage of the pre-Production Code laxity in staging such suggestive ditties as “Pettin’ in the Park,” “Honeymoon Hotel,” and “Shuffle Off to Buffalo.” (britannica.com)

Approximately 20 minutes into the film, the scene of which Miranda is most famous for, Busby Berkeley’s production of the colorful, “The Lady with the Tutti Frutti Hat,” is rumored to be the inspiration in using Miranda’s likeness for the Chiquita Banana model. (Constance Cherise)

A service man on leave in New York, Andy Mason, meets a young show girl in a nightclub, Eadie Allen, and decides to pursue her even though he is engaged to another woman, Vivian Potter, who happens to be the daughter of his father's best friend and business partner. (newyorker.com)

Alice Faye performs the song “No Love, No Nothing,” promising her undying devotion to her male counterpart, yet in an earlier scene she excuses soldiers for their infidelity, solidifying the Hollywood “double standard” expected to be readily accepted by girlfriends and wives alike, a theme that subtly plays throughout many films. (Constance Cherise)

Berkeley moves back and forth between the concrete and the abstract. And turns his human actors into a kind of primordial soup. A biological magma from which personality will ultimately arise. (newyorker.com)

In it's final minutes, it folds in on all it's artificiality and expressivity. in a moment of indulging with the joy of children, the film focuses on a polka dot glove of one of the girls, and it dives within the abstraction of the glove, where performers of perfect harmony gleefully shine alongside the duel sided polka dots of green, pink, blue and orange. a moment of bliss then hazily drifting into a kaleidoscopic whirlwind of our characters being besides the shape and colors that have defines their journey. (Vidyuth Mahesh)

She spent the evening entertaining friends and family in her home, until the wee hours of the morning. When she retired to her bedroom she collapsed of a heart attack, the result of prescription medications supplied by the studio, alcoholism, and above all, a broken heart unable to attain the love or family she truly desired.  (Constance Cherise)

Berkeley then departed for Twentieth Century-Fox, where he made The Gang’s All Here (1943), his wildest picture since his pre-Code days at Warners, and it was his first in Technicolor. Alice Faye was the star, but the film was memorable for Carmen Miranda, whose flamboyant persona combined wonderfully with Berkeley’s unfettered vision to create a camp masterpiece. Nevertheless, production costs made such old-style spectacles unfeasible, and after The Gang’s All Here his films became far less extravagant. (britannica.com)