Kicking off Berkeley’s Hollywood career, Whoopee! cuts to the chase with an opening number that fills the screen with cowgirls—including an uncredited Betty Grable—dancing in formation, a synchronized ripple of legs and hats. Only moments in, the now-iconic overhead shot appears, and individuals become a single abstract, undulating, circular form. In the painted pastel palette of two-strip Technicolor, the star-crossed-lover narrative of the film is lightly taken within a jokey revue format that mixes Old Western style with modern, New York accents and Eddie Cantor doing his proto Woody Allen schtick as the neurotic outcast. A complicated melting pot of racial stereotypes and sexual innuendo—particularly between men—the film now reads as a rich Freudian playground where repressed colonizers exploit the natives for their revealing outerwear. Despite this, the dance numbers directed by the ambitious, imaginative newcomer surge with a beauty and energy otherwise lacking from the more conventionally staged action.