A hearty amount of controversy and salaciousness is squeezed into Wonder Bar’s lightly treated, oddly assorted melodrama featuring Dolores del Rio as a desirable dancer trapped in a love triangle. With many of its scenes simply set-ups for Al Jolson’s comedy routines, Wonder Bar delivers some of its greatest pleasures in its defiance of the recently instated Production Code. Among a celebratory gay moment between two men and a dance with a blatantly sadomasochistic edge, Bacon packs in racy dialogue, male and female gold digging, adultery and murder—all treated with an equal amount of nonchalance. Ingeniously tapping into the nightclub’s reflection of the cinema and its escapist fantasies, Berkeley’s dreamy dance number explodes beyond its physical reality into an infinite mirrored realm, seamlessly and invisibly staged with giant, revolving mirrors and crowned by an overhead shot of the dancers moving in camera aperture formations. Unfortunately, Berkeley’s other elaborate number is certainly why the film is rarely shown. Populated by dancers all in blackface, the piece’s spectacular staging—including a scene of Jolson’s riding a mule into heaven with uncanny echoes of The Wizard of Oz (1939)—is understandably overlooked today.