The following are the innovations that Berkeley is most noted for:

• His use of one camera. The first thing he did on the set of Whoopee was to lay off two of the cameramen, saying he didn't need more then one camera.
• He liberated the camera by placing it in all sorts of positions, even putting it on cranes, in order to get high enough for the image he wanted. The camera became a participant. He put it above the dancer's heads, between their legs, under water, above buildings, below buildings and even cut holes in the roof of the set when he need to get even higher. Previously, movie musicals had mostly looked like filmed broadway plays, but Berkeley put the camera in so many places that the audience could feel a part of the action and changed their look forever.
• Having learned about drilling troops during WWI, he used his knowledge, to the fullest, to present movement of groupings around the stage in a unique style.
• His work in the 1930's was the epitome of broadway modernity; jazz based.
• While he wasn't the first to do overhead shots, he certainly perfected the style by using elaborate geometric shapes and images.
• Use of beautiful women in dance numbers and use of closeups to show these women became a Berkeley trademark.
• He was first to use a musical number as a "story within a story". Example: Lullaby of Broadway from Gold Diggers of 1935 (considered to be his best work on film), was 15 minutes long and told the story of a young girl in New York Society who gets killed in the end. Has a great dance sequence when we see hundreds of tap dancers tapping while the girl and her date (Dick Powell) looked on.

• Berkeley seemed to have an obsession with women getting killed. He killed them in 42nd Street and Lullaby of Broadway to name two numbers.
• Use of women as "objects" to create his geometric images.
• Pettin' in the Park from Gold Diggers of 1933 was probably the most voyeuristic number which showed us women in silhouette undressing.
• Berkeley and Warner Brothers loved Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He was extremely patriotic and his earlier films, 42nd Street and Gold Diggers of 1933 were tributes to FDR's "New Deal". 42nd Street was advertised as a "new deal in entertainment" and was timed to open in Washington, DC during FDR's inauguration. Gold Diggers of 1933 tapped into the optimism set forth by the FDR administration that things were going to get better.
• The Forgotten Man number in Gold Diggers of 1933 is Berkeley's tribute to all the soldiers who came back from WWI to find a destroyed economy and no jobs for them.
• Water - Berkeley loved water. In fact, every morning for 1/2 hour he would sit in his bathtub creating ideas for his day's shooting. "By a Waterfall" from Footlight Parade illustrates this passion with water and his truly erotic nature. He used all kinds of metaphors like lines of girls in the water as zippers opening and closing, girls jumping into the water as ejaculations, etc. He was able to get away with these openly erotic images because no one person was doing anything luciferous in any one number and the Hayes code had not yet be put in place. Instead, he was praised for his abstract images produced by the hundreds of women who made up these images. We need not even mention the films he did with Esther Williams which produced some of the most beautiful water ballets ever filmed.
• More erotic images were seen in his 20th Century Fox musical The Gang's All Here. Who could miss it with all the bananas and strawberries flying around as Carmen Miranda sang the "The Lady with the Tutti Fruiti Hat".

To learn more about each actor, click on their name and you will be taken to their info at the Internet Movie Database.