Footlight Parade
James Cagney made the transition from gats to taps when he convinced Warner
Bros. head Jack Warner to give him a change of pace with the lead in
Footlight Parade, Busby Berkeley's 1933 musical extravaganza. Coming on the heels of the studio's
first two groundbreaking musicals --
42nd Street (1933) and
Gold Diggers of
1933 - the film had a way to go to top its predecessors. But, with Cagney dancing for the
first time on screen, Joan Blondell cracking wise as only she could and 100
chorus girls swimming through a gigantic studio tank in the spectacular "By
a Waterfall" number, most fans agree that it's the ultimate Warners
musical.
As soon as he heard about the studio's plans to follow Berkeley's two smash musicals,
Cagney campaigned for the role. After all, he reminded Warner, he had
started out as a song-and-dance man and only blundered into gangster roles
when he'd switched roles with the original star of
The Public
Enemy (1931). After Cagney reached film stardom, he continued to tap around
the house after each day's shooting. In fact, visitors with dancing
experience, like George Burns and Gracie Allen, were usually handed tap
shoes and asked to join in.
Footlight Parade marked the third teaming for Dick Powell and Ruby
Keeler, who had shot to stardom in the first two Berkeley musicals at
Warners. It also marked a reunion for Cagney and Blondell, who had started
at Warners together in 1930's
Sinner's Holiday, which they had also
done on Broadway.
Footlight Parade was actually their sixth film
together. Blondell had just married the film's cameraman, George Barnes,
though that didn't guarantee her better camera angles; her natural beauty
rarely came through on screen and always astonished fans lucky enough to
meet her in the flesh.
A backstage story like
42nd Street,
Footlight Parade saved
most of its musical numbers for the film's finale. Before the finale, however,
the movie is a fast-paced comedy about a Broadway producer who fights the inroads made by talking pictures during the Great Depression by staging extravagant "prologues" for movie theaters. Though she didn't get to sing or dance in the film,
Blondell almost stole the picture as Cagney's secretary and love interest.
When she kicks out a gold digger after his fortune, Blondell quips, "As
long as they've got sidewalks, you've got a job." The line would be edited out in
later years, when film censorship became more stringent, not to return
until the picture's 1970 reissue.
After the simple plot was established,
Footlight Parade focused on dancing, with three of Berkeley's best numbers back-to-back. First up was "Honeymoon Hotel," in
which Powell and Keeler's efforts to enjoy their
honeymoon in private are thwarted by relatives, well-wishers and a lecherous baby
(Billy Barty) who almost shares their wedding night. The number
was heavily cut by local censors.
Next came the 15-minute number, "By a Waterfall." Berkeley came up with the idea
when someone asked him how he was going to top the numbers in
Gold
Diggers of 1933. When he suggested the first on-screen aquacade,
Warner screamed "Stop right there! It will take the Bank of America to
keep you going." But a few weeks later, he suggested that Berkeley try the
number in
Footlight Parade. The set, complete with an 80-by-40-foot
swimming pool, took up an entire soundstage. Berkeley had the pool lined
with glass walls and a glass floor so he could shoot the swimmers from
every possible angle. Then he designed the swimming suits and bathing caps
to create the illusion that the women were almost naked. He rehearsed the
number for two weeks, then shot it in six days as technicians pumped 20,000
gallons of water a minute over the set's artificial falls. The results
were so spectacular that the audience at the premiere gave the number a
standing ovation and threw their programs in the air. Broadway impresario Billy Rose even
tried to steal Berkeley from Warners to stage his aquacade.
For the finale, "Shanghai Lil," Cagney donned a sailor's suit and tap shoes
to sing and dance the story of a sailor searching for his lost love in what
most astute viewers realized was a brothel and opium den. When he finds
her -- Ruby Keeler masquerading as a Chinese girl -- they joyously tap dance on
the bar before getting caught in a full-scale brawl with 150 sailors and
chorus girls. During the fight scene one chorus girl accidentally walked
into a fist and ended up unconscious under one of the tables (the same
dancer, years later, would marry MGM studio head Louis B. Mayer). Featured
briefly in the sequence are a young John Garfield (five years before
signing a Warners contract; he did extra work as a sailor briefly seen
peeking over a barrel during the fight) and then-unknown chorus girls Ann
Sothern and Dorothy Lamour. But the scene was Cagney's all the way. When
the film opened, a reporter from the trade paper
Variety located Max
Tishman, an agent who had fired Cagney for demanding a raise during his
song-and-dance days. When the reporter asked him what he thought of his
former client, Tishman said he'd be happy to give Cagney the raise if he
ever wanted to come back.
Producer: Robert Lord
Director: Lloyd Bacon
Screenplay: Manuel Seff, James Seymour
Cinematography: George Barnes
Art Direction: Anton Grot
Music: Leo F. Forbstein
Principal Cast: James Cagney (Chester Kent), Joan Blondell (Nan Prescott),
Ruby Keeler (Bea Thorn), Dick Powell (Scotty Blair), Guy Kibbee (Silas
Gould), Ruth Donnelly (Harriet Bowers Gould), Claire Dodd (Vivian Rich),
Hugh Herbert (Charlie Bowers), Frank McHugh (Francis).
BW-104m. Closed captioning.
by Frank Miller
Footlight Parade
Footlight Parade is a musical with a swagger. This backstage tale is full of song and dance, but it's also a Warner Bros. early-1930s picture, which means it has an earthiness you don't usually find in the musical genre. Star James Cagney, who plays Chester Kent, a producer of musical "prologues" staged in movie theaters between showings of features, embodies its scrappiness.
The movie opens with Kent's real business, Broadway musicals, taking a hit with the arrival of talking pictures. The movie uses that late-1920s hit as a symbolic equivalent of the 1929 hit
everyone took, the great depression, and gives the movie a familiar Warner ripped-from-the-headlines context. Kent's ability to roll with the punches and, through hard work and ingenuity, find another outlet for his skills was no doubt intended as a morale-booster for the public.
Even more appealing than the populist connection with the audience here is the general ethos exuded by
Footlight Parade. Cagney's Kent is no desk jockey. He's a hard-working expert in his field who, when he wants to show his worry-wart dance director (comic relief Frank McHugh) a move, simply demonstrates it himself. He's not the sort of bean counter who might be in charge of, say, a studio today. In fact, any whiff of pretentiousness or self-importance is roundly mocked here, whether it's in a woman whose singing audition seems more suited for the opera (Cagney's and McHugh's characters trade snickers and eyerolls) or a golddigger who tries to pass herself off as "cultured" (Claire Dodd). Adding to the no-nonsense Warner feel is the presence of the irrepressible Joan Blondell as Kent's trusty, smitten and taken-for-granted secretary.
The plot of
Footlight Parade has Kent working himself to the point of exhaustion to come up with ideas for prologues to keep his companies of singer and dancers on the road, and to beat a competing prologue agency that's been stealing his ideas. A big contract to provide prologues for a theater chain is up for grabs, and Kent and his crew (including Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler as his onstage stars) hurry to get three prologues ready to preview for the chain owner (Paul Porcasi) at three of his Manhattan theaters on the same Saturday night.
In a sense, the plot is just an excuse to get us to the performance of the three prologues. But the characters, performances and attitude are all so strong that the story never comes off as half-assed. When it comes time for those prologues, though, it's as if you've entered a different movie. Lloyd Bacon (
42nd Street) gets credited as director for the movie with "Numbers Created and Directed by Busby Berkeley" (the DVD is available individually or as part of
The Busby Berkeley Collection). The escapism and extravagance of Berkeley's production numbers are in full bloom in
Footlight Parade. This flight of fantasy should have been detrimental to the hard-edged credibility of the first 75 minutes of the movie, since not only are the prologues more expansive than anything that could be staged in an old movie palace, but the changing visual perspectives of these sequences don't even try to make them seem like something being presented on proscenium stages (two even have brief moments of animation).
The prologues are
so blatantly unconcerned with trying to fit in with the rest of the movie that to resist them for that reason seems silly. You just have to take them for what they are, and they're certainly more interesting as Berkeley showpieces than as continuations of the previous action. The first is "Honeymoon Hotel," which manages to be both risqué and cloyingly cute as Powell and Keeler play newlyweds checking into a hotel catering to sex-hungry couples. Next up is the most outrageous, "By a Waterfall," which gleefully indulges in Berkeley's knack for formations of lovely ladies and for imaginative camera placement. The last, "Shanghai Lil," has its own outrageousness as it segues from Far East romance to patriotic salute (complete with a mural of then-new president Franklin D. Roosevelt), and like me you may cringe at Keeler's pidgin English as the title character, but this one also gives us Cagney, the old hoofer, singing and dancing after Kent is pressed into service.
Despite its schizo nature,
Footlight Parade is certainly a satisfying whole, and its jittery energy still comes across nearly 75 years after it was made. The new DVD includes a solid 15-minute featurette
Footlight Parade: Music for the Decades that concentrates mainly on the efforts of Berkeley and of the men who wrote the songs for most of his musicals, Al Dubin and Harry Warren. There are also two 1930s WB cartoons built around songs from the movie and a couple of musical one-reelers. I can't imagine watching any of these extras more than once, through one of the one-reelers includes a song by Baby Rose Marie, 30 years before, as a grown-up, she was a regular on TV's
The Dick Van Dyke Show.
For more information about
Footlight Parade, visit
Warner Video. To order
Footlight Parade, go to
TCM Shopping.
by Paul Sherman