Classic Cinema: Footlight Parade (1933) - Reviewed

Images courtesy of Warner Brothers

1933 was the year of the Warner Brothers Vitaphone pre-code musical escapist melodrama choreographed by Busby Berkeley, co-written by James Seymour and featuring original songs and music by Harry Warren and Al Dublin and the year that saved the studio and perhaps the musical subgenre itself.  Comprised of Gold Diggers of 1933, 42^nd Street and today’s film Footlight Parade, all three pictures more or less unanimously aired the same declaration: there’s no Business like Show Business!  Made and set amid the Great Depression, all three pictures concern failing musical directors or actresses or performers somewhere in New York trying to put on a successful show with all the behind-the-scenes drama on full display.  Usually centered around the formulation of a show and uphill battles between stage director and performer, eventually the show inevitably goes on before a live audience and from there the film drifts freely into visually expansive fantastical musical numbers. 
 
Chester Kent (James Cagney) is down on his luck in the Depression era Broadway musical circuit as a stage musical director.  However, not all is lost as he shifts gears instead focusing on musical numbers called “prologues”, i.e. short live stage productions presented in movie theaters before a film is shown on a film screen.  Weighing down on a beleaguered theater director who repeatedly decries “It can’t be done!”, Chester soon finds himself in over his head as investors demand he stages prologues throughout the country.  Meanwhile competing rival outfits are busily trying to steal his ideas through a mole inside his own company.  All the time, unbeknownst to the stressed and overwhelmed Chester, his dutiful and devoted secretary Nan (Joan Blondell) has fallen for him and through all of this is his closest ally.  As the clock continues to tick closer to showtime, Chester’s hand is forced and he locks himself and his staff inside the theater to intensely rehearse and star in the show himself in order to prevent thievery of his musical theater concepts.

 
Written for the screen by Manuel Seff and James Seymour based on a story by Robert Lord and Peter Milne, Footlight Parade is perhaps among the most spectacular Busby Berkeley Depression era escapist musicals about show business in the trio of Gold Diggers of 1933 and even 42^nd Street.  A vehicle for James Cagney to return to his vaudevillian roots and move away from the gangster film ala The Public Enemy, featuring a lot of singing and dancing including risque pre-code numbers like Shanghai Lil and the visually stunning By a Waterfall sequence including three hundred trained swimmer dancers, its at once bawdy and more than a little racist including some offending black face as well as yellow face with references to an opium den and brothel.  Still, it is the first time Cagney ever danced onscreen in a film and the By a Waterfall montage which plainly influenced a certain parody in The Great Muppet Caper and later still Hail, Caesar! remains one of the seven wonders of the cinema world in terms of sheer grandiosity.  Watching these scenes unfold in motion, your mind briefly forgets the very things that date it to the pre-code Hollywood era as you are swept up in the sensory overload.  No excuses as well as no denying the visual splendor on display too.

 
Busby Berkeley’s choreography, it goes without saying, is almost like a Rorschach kaleidoscopic bending of the visual senses with arresting set pieces by Anton Grot and Jack Okey.  Special attention goes to renowned Oscar-winning cinematographer George Barnes who was nominated for Best Cinematography a total of eight times before finally winning for work on Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca.  There’s also some movie-within-movie commentary on Hollywood, cinemas and the concept of the ‘prologue’ live theater act such as a notable sequence where the principal characters are in a theater and watch a short film before the screen lifts up and another live program goes on.  And within the film itself is a literal walking censor in the form of Hugh Herbert who keeps stepping in to point out which elements of the show go too far. 

 
The cast is star studded with a fantastic Joan Blondell as a wisecracking confident secretary who seems to always be cleaning up after her client James Cagney’s messes.  Ruby Keeler, Dick Powell, Frank McHugh and Guy Kibbee make up much of the supporting cast while those who are really looking will spot an early role by future Legend, Rumpelstiltskin and Willow actor Billy Barty.  Mostly though, it plays off of the screen dynamic of Blondell and James Cagney’s musical dancing talents in a role that all but completely dispels any and all notions of his gangster film fare.  Late into the film when he has to take over finishing the show and locks everyone into the theater so they can rehearse without interruption, I was reminded of the dramatic turn he’d later take in Man of a Thousand Faces as Lon Chaney and how he was able to balance the role-within-a-role theatricality.  In a role that’s alive with bursting energy and physical movement that took years of training, it speaks volumes to just how talented the actor really was and could do far more than appear intimidating or threatening.

 
Released theatrically in 1933, the film budgeted at around $703,000 raked in a staggering $2.4 million, making it one of the most profitable films for Warner Brothers of that year.  In 1992, the film was inducted into the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress and in 2006 was further nominated for the AFI’s Greatest Movie Musicals.  Largely a chance for James Cagney to show what he really could do in a role that sort of reunited him with his roots, Footlight Parade while at times problematic in that pre-code way for some people is unquestionably an astounding achievement in technical filmmaking, choreography and larger than life screen personas lifting the hearts and minds of Depression Era viewership.  One of a kind and still dazzling to the eyes in an almost hallucinatory fashion, Footlight Parade is both timeless and a snapshot of a transitional time of economic strife and survival for an entire nation of American filmgoers.  Most of all, its really fun and kind of breathtaking at times.

--Andrew Kotwicki