Essentially an eighty-minute preamble to an extensive baroque set piece, Gold Diggers of 1937 mounts a convoluted plot around a shady life insurance deal orchestrated by a pair of theater producers to capitalize on the failing health of their show manager. As the schemers find ways to hurry along their colleague’s demise so as to fund one of their most elaborate productions yet, the naïve insurance salesman (Dick Powell) falls for the strategic charms of a former chorus girl (Joan Blondell) in on the ruse, but everyone’s plans have to be adjusted when the producer just won’t drop dead. Director Lloyd Bacon keeps the musical numbers to a minimum so as to spotlight the biting black comedy of Warren Duff’s screenplay, which burlesques Depression-era desperation in often startlingly direct ways, but it’s all just foreplay for the final show, in which Berkeley unleashes his choreographic fireworks for a provocative act called “All’s Fair in Love and War.” Featuring anachronistic simulations of trench warfare between the male and female dancers, as well as such astonishing sights as that of a dozen white flags twirling in perfect sync, the robust visual display is only further energized by its staging against a reflective black floor.