Cagney’s electric tapping stunned the moviegoers who had seen him in 13 films over the last three years, all as a nervy tough guy. But the opening pan down the bar, visiting with hedonists of all races and religions is the sort of scene that would also be a casualty of the Production Code. “Shanghai Lil” is a bit on the politically incorrect side, with Ruby Keeler making an absurdly unconvincing Oriental siren. In another year or so, there would be no more Dubin and Warren songs about having sex. “Honeymoon Hotel” begins with a jaunty Pre-Code raciness. ![]() ![]() They are unique in the sense that never before or since did three such wildly imaginative follow one another in “can’t top this” succession. The three production numbers that end this film each run at least a full reel (11-12 minutes) and cost about $10,000 minute-Depression era dollars, so multiply that at least by a factor of 10. Fanchon and Marco were the best known stagers of these prologues, and Footlight Parade was vaguely based on their organization. The Rockettes shows at Radio City Music Hall are a remnant of this kind of production. One of them was to have live stage shows before the films, in some cases condensed versions of Broadway hits. He improvised, “Sid, I can see a big waterfall coming down through the rocks with girls sliding down the rapids into a huge Ziegfieldean pool with 24 golden springboards and a gold fountain telescoping into the air…” Cheapskate Jack Warner blanched, but Berkeley’s pictures were making so much money for the studio, he allowed him to design his fantasy for “By a Waterfall”ĭuring the Depression, theater attendance fell off so much that exhibitors took desperate measures. At the premiere of Gold Diggers of 1933, Sid Grauman of the Chinese Theater asked Berkeley how he could ever top the numbers in that film. These numbers were rehearsed and rehearsed until they were perfect.Ĥ2nd Street and Gold Diggers of 1933 made so much money for Warner Brothers that they hastened to continue their series with Footlight Parade. He loved shiny black floors and dancers in white, he loved girls’ faces and other parts of their bodies, too. Berkeley had a unique advantage at Warner Brothers, in that he was not required to showcase a particular musical star, but worked with an ensemble, since it was the chorus that seemed particularly to inspire him. He made the camera a participant in his dance routines, not just a spectator, from the earliest work he did in Hollywood for Eddie Cantor in Whoopee. There was a tension between innocence and vulgarity, a fragmenting of the female body that only he could imagine on the screen. There were no overhead views, but he used stairs and platforms to alter the space on stage, and in Earl Carroll Vanities of 1928 he used an optical device called the “Vanities Votaphonevitotone” to project enlargements of one chorus girl’s face at a time on a screen.īerkeley’s giddy, girly kaleidoscopes in his great early Warner Brothers period, from 42nd Street in 1933 to The Gold Diggers of 1935 had an art deco geometry that other dance numbers simply didn’t. There were intimations of his movie style in chorus numbers Berkeley did on stage, where showgirls became factory assembly lines or airplanes. Berkeley learned about choreography from closely observing the dancers, he had no dance training. This theme, in many cases, may only have been the decorative display of the female body. ![]() Revues were not a series of completely unrelated acts, like in a vaudeville show, but a series of musical and comedy specialties structured around a loosely defining theme. They evolved from the revues that had been popular on Broadway in the 1910s and 1920s. While Berkeley’s dance extravaganzas of the early 1930s would seem to be impossible anywhere but on the movie screen, they in fact did have origins dating back to 19th century stage spectacles. At RKO, the Astaire-Rogers musicals would soon change the landscape, but for the moment, the backstage musical was king. The wisp of a plot involves the brief vogue for staged prologues before new-fangled talking pictures, and concludes with three massive production numbers of sharply escalating nuttiness.įootlight Parade required two directors, Lloyd Bacon for the plot and Busby Berkeley for the musical numbers. Shown with “By Request” starring Claude Hopkins and his Orchestra.īerkeley’s dazzling masterpiece Footlight Parade has racy Pre-Code dialogue, Cagney (the best actor he ever worked with) and full indulgence of an obsession with chorine geography. James Cagney, Joan Blondell, Ruby Keeler, Dick Powell (104 min). Footlight Parade (1933) Directed by Lloyd Bacon and Busby Berkeley.
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