For that alone, this film belongs in the collections of serious film fanatics. It was the first time audiences got a chance to see Cagney’s considerable skills as a dancer. Once he landed the part, he put his all into the project, and between rat-a-tat dialogue and fancy footwork, he hardly pauses to take a breath. The actor campaigned his bosses hard to get the lead in Footlight Parade, because he was tired of being typecast as a gangster. The main reason this silliness is so watchable is James Cagney. ![]() You’re having too much fun to ask “Where’d the swimming pool come from?” Yet, it doesn’t matter that the three over-the-top Busby Berkley musical numbers that make up the final third of the movie could never actually be produced on a theater stage. ![]() Can Kent and company beat his rivals to a big 40-theater contract by staging three spectacular mini musicals in one night? They’ll sure as heck try!Īs I watched Footlight Parade, I couldn’t help but think of that old chestnut, “They don’t make ‘em like this anymore.” The story is corny, it makes little sense, and there is not the slightest attempt to approach plausibility. Somehow, the idea is a goldmine but his empire is threatened by a rival company that is stealing his ideas and his customers. That company includes a dedicated secretary (Joan Blondell), a boy tenor (Dick Powell), a mousey office girl turner hoofer (Ruby Keeler), and a cigar-chomping choreographer (Frank McHugh). When things look blackest, he comes up with the idea of producing short musical “prologues” to be performed live for audiences before the main feature in movie theaters, and he builds up a huge company to take his shows on the road throughout the country. Due to the popularity of talking pictures, Broadway shows are closing prematurely, and theater director Chester Kent (James Cagney) finds himself out of a job and divorced from his gold-digging wife. However, I like to support HD releases of silent and early talkie film so when the Warner Archive announced that they were releasing Footlight Parade (1933) on Blu-ray, sourced from a 2K scan of the original camera negative, I thought, “Why not? Give it a try.” The film turned out to be both much weirder and more entertaining than I was expecting. The “Busby Berkeley” part of the equation just held no appeal for me. At the same time, I’ve never had much interest in hordes of synchronized chorus girls forming kaleidoscopic patterns or stacked like ornamentation on a garish wedding cake. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and Mary Poppins rank amongst my top ten favorite films, and I rarely let a 4th of July pass without a viewing of our all-singing, all-dancing founding fathers in 1776. ![]() One of my cinematic blind spots has always been the Pre-Code early talkie musicals choreographed by Busby Berkeley.
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