Born Today: Busby Berkeley/Don Cheadle
The demon choreographer of Hollywood dance and one of today's most versatile actors.
Happy 128th birthday to Berkeley William Enos, a.k.a. Busby Berkeley, whose dance direction in the Studio Era is one of the proofs of the movies as a medium of the strangest and most inspired order. From his work on early-talkie Warner Bros. musicals (“42nd Street,” “Footlight Parade,” the “Golddiggers” series) to his Technicolor days at Fox and MGM, Berkeley freed cinematic choreography from its stage origins and lifted the camera, the audience, and the dance up into a surreal world of celluloid quantum physics that still prompts gasps today. Just one example: The “Polka Dot Polka” from 1943’s “The Gang’s All Here,” which starts in true 20th Century Fox corndog fashion with Alice Faye singing to a bunch of terpsichorean tykes and right around the 2:40 mark blasts off into Dada-land. There is nothing else in film like it, as if Berkeley had invented fractal geometry by studying an artichoke.
Also celebrating a birthday today, his 59th: Don Cheadle, an alarmingly busy actor — over 50 movies in 30 years! — whose wit and timing have stolen many a film from its nominal stars and whose lead roles are few but juicy as hell: A hotel manager in the midst of genocide in “Hotel Rwanda” (2004), for which Cheadle was Oscar nominated; his Miles Davis in the flawed but fascinating 2015 biopic “Miles Ahead,” which Cheadle directed; and motor-mouthed radio host/activist Petey Greene in “Talk To Me” (2007). He wears his Cockney accent in the “Oceans” movies with fraudulent delight, and his lecture duel with Adam Driver in last year’s “White Noise” was the best scene in the entire movie (sorry, no link). But I’ll just leave you with the moment that Cheadle entered the 1995 Denzel Washington noir “Devil in a Blue Dress” as a charismatic little killer named Mouse and walked out of the movie a star.
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