After directing parades as a lieutenant during WWI, Busby Berkeley returned stateside to work with Florenz Ziegfeld on Broadway. The stage led to films when Eddie Cantor (another Ziegfeld protégé) suggested that Berkeley choreograph the dance routines for Samuel Goldwyn's saucy Whoopee (1930). Although he began his career with Goldwyn (the pre-Code Cantor vehicles are incredibly racy—who could resist the ditty, "Bend Down, Sister!" sung by a chorine of scantily-clad bakers) Berkeley's career skyrocketed when he moved to Warner Bros. Conceived during the depths of the Great Depression, films such as 42nd Street (1933) and the Gold Diggers series, offered a salve to moviegoers eager for uplift. Berkeley delivered in ways unforeseen: using his single-camera technique, he careened in and out of the showgirls' legs but also took time to give each of them a close-up. They were all beautiful, why shouldn't the audience look at them, he conceded, indeed, why not look at hundreds of them? Thinking primarily of the men in the audience, Berkeley appealed to biographer Martin Rubin's idea of the "seraglio effect:" by placing women in no-men-allowed environments—locker rooms, dorms, changing rooms—the women could be free of inhibition, penetrated only by the viewer's gaze. With a dip in musical popularity in 1938, Berkeley moved to MGM where Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney were foisted on him to put on a show that neither group were particularly interested in. Soon the brilliant Berkeley was demoted to dance director and come 1941 he was suffering from alcoholism, depression and increasing conflicts with his co-workers. There were still a few grand ideas percolating, however: water was a muse for both he and Esther Williams in Million Dollar Mermaid (1952) and bananas had never carried as erotic a charge as when they danced with Carmen Miranda in The Gang's All Here (1943).