It was always such a big production

The Busby Berkeley Collection

(Warner Home Video, $60 for the set; $20 each)

FROM 1933 through 1938, choreographer and director Busby Berkeley created surreal, swirling and outrageously extravagant musical numbers for Warner Bros. musicals.

Berkeley loved tight close-ups of his cast but was not afraid to use an entire soundstage to capture one of his lavish numbers. A platform he had built for himself and his camera crew would be raised to the top of the rafters over the stage so he could film his dancers from above as they performed geometric and eye-popping synchronized movements.

This new DVD collection features five of his films that showcase his avant-garde production numbers: “42nd Street” (the only one of the five previously released on DVD), “Gold Diggers of 1933,” “Footlight Parade,” “Dames” and “Gold Diggers of 1935,” which he also directed. A bonus disc features 20 musical numbers from nine of his films.

The films collected here feature the delightful tunes of Harry Warren and Al Dubin -- the majority are standards -- and several of the same actors including Ruby Keeler (then married to Al Jolson), Dick Powell and Joan Blondell.

Gold Diggers of 1933

This snappy, racy “pre-Code” musical from 1933 opens with a delicious Berkeley-staged number of “We’re In the Money,” with a young Ginger Rogers leading a bevy of beauties dressed in coins. Rogers even performs the tune in pig Latin.

Directed by Mervyn LeRoy, “Gold Diggers” stars Keeler, Blondell and a wise-cracking Aline MacMahon as three out-of-work chorus girls hoping to get roles in a new Broadway show and nab husbands at the same time.

Among the highlights are the poignant “Remember My Forgotten Man,” “The Shadow Waltz,” which features hundreds of young women performing with neon violins, and the naughty, gaudy “Pettin’ in the Park.”

Word has it that the stage was lifted some 40 feet for Berkeley to achieve his sweeping shots.

Extras: Two new featurettes, “FDR’s New Deal: Broadway Bound” and “42nd Street: From Book to Stage to Screen”; the vintage featurette “The 42nd Street Special” and three vintage cartoons.

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Footlight Parade

Powell has to take a back seat to dynamo James Cagney in this peppy musical comedy, also from 1933. By the time he made “Footlight Parade,” Cagney was the studio’s main tough guy, having become a superstar in 1931 in “The Public Enemy.” Despite his gangster persona, Cagney had been an accomplished hoofer and singer onstage in the 1920s.

Here, he’s a hard-drinking, hard-living producer of prologue -- musical numbers that would appear before a movie would be shown -- a performance that landed him his Oscar-winning part as song-and-dance man George M. Cohan in 1942’s “Yankee Doodle Dandy.”

Among the musical numbers are “By a Waterfall,” in which Keeler and several other women frolic in skimpy bathing suits in the water, and Cagney’s “Shanghai Lil,” which features the chorus creating an American flag that transforms into President Franklin D. Roosevelt and then an eagle, the symbol of his New Deal’s National Recovery Administration program.

Extras: “Footlight Parade: Music for the Decades,” which focuses on Warren and Dubin; two vintage featurettes; and two vintage cartoons.

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Dames

Despite some kitschy Berkeley numbers, this 1934 musical comedy is thin on laughs. Keeler plays the daughter of a reformer who wants to become a Broadway star. Powell is her very distant cousin, who has written a Broadway show. Blondell is a chorine who helps Powell get the money for his production.

The film does boast three hummable Dubin and Warren songs: “Dames,” “I Only Have Eyes for You” and “The Girl at the Ironing Board.” According to publicity records at the studio, with this film Warners came up with the term “cinematerpsichorean” to describe Berkeley’s choreography.

Extras: A new featurette, “Busby Berkeley’s Kaleidoscopic Eyes”; three vintage shorts, including a truly bizarre Technicolor musical comedy “Good Morning, Eve,” starring Leon Errol; and the daffy promo “And She Learned About Dames.”

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Gold Diggers of 1935

The fourth installment in the Warner Bros. “Gold Diggers” musical franchise finds Powell playing a resort hotel employee asked by a millionaire’s skinflint widow (Alice Brady) to accompany her feisty young daughter (Gloria Stuart of “Titanic” fame) to events -- the daughter’s much older fiance (Hugh Herbert) is too busy writing a paper on snuff boxes.

The film features two elaborate numbers, including “The Words Are In My Heart,” in which 56 women play 56 white pianos as they undulate across a polished black floor. The pianos were pushed by stagehands, dressed in black, who were stationed under each piano.

The darkly creepy “Lullaby of Broadway” (which won the Academy Award for best song) follows the self-destruction of a Broadway baby (Winifred Shaw) who dances until dawn and then accidentally falls to her death.

Extras: The new featurette, “(buz’be bur’kle)n. A Study in Style”; a vintage short; and two cartoons from the era.

-- Susan King