![]() Footlight Parade marked Warner’s third 1933 backstage foray (after 42nd Street and Gold Diggers of 1933), and though it contains a few fresh elements, the tale of a feisty impresario (Cagney) who must battle embezzlers and an in-house spy who leaks all his ideas to a theatrical rival possesses a formulaic feel. ![]() Unfortunately, the movie’s weak storyline puts a damper on his coming out party. Cohan in Yankee Doodle Dandy, Cagney shows off his fleet feet here. A veteran of vaudeville and Broadway musicals, the pint-sized dynamo could dance up a storm, and almost a decade before he wowed audiences and won a Best Actor Oscar as George M. He also surprised his fans – who heretofore only knew him as an on-screen tough guy – by unveiling his considerable toe-tapping talent. Already a major star thanks to his electrifying performance in the pre-Code gangster flick The Public Enemy, Cagney lends the proceedings a much-needed jolt with his patented pugnacity and boundless energy. Though Berkeley is also famous for directing almost all of the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland backyard musicals later in his career, he made his mark and cemented his reputation with a handful of Warner extravaganzas in the early 1930s.įootlight Parade is one of his most lavish concoctions, and the addition of the charismatic James Cagney to the Warner musical stock company led by hoofer Ruby Keeler and crooner Dick Powell further buoys the film. In the blink of an eye, a static, dull genre became an art form, and the renaissance would last a generation. Berkeley took the camera where it never had gone before, lifting it up and away to a bird’s-eye perch, and thanks to a bevy of contorting chorus girls down below, fashioned an array of eye-popping fantasies that captivated Depression-era audiences desperate for escape. Bacon.) His creations elevate not just this movie, but the entire musical genre, which was all but dead before the brazen Berkeley put his personal stamp on it and resuscitated the form. Without Berkeley’s awe-inspiring handiwork, Footlight Parade would be just another stale, dime-a-dozen backstage musical. He also directed them in Footlight Parade, and because they grab all the attention, he gets the credit for the whole film. That’s not entirely incorrect, because Berkeley, a former Broadway choreographer who revolutionized the movie musical by devising ingenious kaleidoscopic set-pieces that transformed chorus lines into geometric shapes and patterns, conceived the musical sequences in both films. The journeyman director helmed a couple of groundbreaking Hollywood musicals ( 42nd Street and Footlight Parade) in the early 1930s, but ask even serious classic film buffs who directed those pictures and they’ll likely say Busby Berkeley. Starring: James Cagney, Joan Blondell, Ruby Keeler, Dick Powellīlu-ray Special Features: Featurette, vintage short subjects, animated shorts, trailer ![]() Theatrical Release Date: October 21, 1933 The closest thing to an acid trip in 1930s Hollywood was a Busby Berkeley musical number, and Footlight Parade is one of the filmmaker’s most potent hallucinogens.
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