This cheerful yet somehow alarming individual drifts weightless towards us, crooning "Brazil", right at the start of the film. He's not quite as skull-beneath-the-skin terrifying as Wini Shaw in GOLD DIGGERS OF 1935, but it turns out he's only a foretaste of the main attraction, which comes at the film's end:

At the climax of a number celebrating the perennial joys of the polka dot, the traditional B.B. chorus-line transmutes by the aid of mirrors into a glistening Technicolor iris-sphincter, permutating kaleidoscopically and finally emitting --

Eugene Pallette! B. Kite and I struggled to capture this man's majesty in our Believer article on character actors, only for Fiona to encapsulate the Great Man in a colossal nutshell: "He's the brick shithouse everybody's always talking about."

Anyway, I don't want to take that sphincter metaphor any further than I absolutely have to, but basically the entire cast of the film is evacuated right in our faces, an image out of Heironymous Bosch.

It's hard to decide who's more terrifying. Mock-turtle Edward Everett Horton on a sickly green polka dot platter, lunging into our eyes like a vision from Hades, certainly comes near the  top. For once in this film, Carmen Miranda is actually less horripilating than everybody else.

Benny Goodman is just WRONG ALL OVER. He's an odd film presence, in general, quite likably different and welcome, but hurled bodiless towards us with a translucent lavender ruff, he becomes a CREATURE OF NIGHTMARE.

AARGH! Shit shit shit get it way from me! Charlotte Greenwood demonstrates why Nicholas Ray slept with a gun under his pillow. If you wake up from dreaming of THIS, you've gotta be able to fire off a few rounds at anything lurking in the corner of the room or you'll have a case of the screaming ab-dabs for sure.

And then Alice Faye, the singing Simone Signoret, with her cerulean-blue face, is wafted at us on happy updrafts of melody and we realise that we truly are in the Twentieth Century Fox's idea of Sheol, Gehenna, the bottomless pit -- adrift, decapitated, among the eternally smiling, hopelessly insane stars.

"Hell will have no surprises for them!"

And:

This isn't a theory! Russell has talked often about his love of Busby Berkeley's musical numbers (also: Fritz Lang's METROPOLIS; THE WIZARD OF OZ; THE BLUE ANGEL) and specifically homaged them in THE BOYFRIEND, but with a little squinting you can see their influence all over his work. Mad Ken correctly perceives them as nightmarish hallucinations (dreamed up by Busby in the bath under the malign influence of the dry martini, coincidentally Bunuel's favourite tipple) and uses their Vigorously Oneiric Qualities regularly in his own work. The skull that moves in on us during the credits of GOTHIC is an even closer match for Wini Shaw in GOLD DIGGERS OF 1935, whom I've always referred to as The Floating Head of Death. She freaks me out, drifting in on me like that! Only Arthur Frayn from ZARDOZ is allowed to pull a stunt like that in my household. And even then, only once a year, on his birthday.

Now I'm wondering if the Floating Head Woman against the star-scape at the end of THE ELEPHANT MAN ("Nothing will die"), who fades from view, morphs into Virginia Madsen (we LOVE Virginia Madsen!), slips on a ruff and comes back at the start of DUNE, is also a descendant of Wini Shaw?

Put another way: does David Lynch love Busby Berkeley?

He'd be CRAZY not to!