Footlight Parade

Footlight Parade

1933

Producer: Busby Berkeley

Starring: James Cagney, Joan Blondell, Ruby Keeler, Dick Powell

I am a fan of musicals, but not unreservedly so.  Busby Berkeley, with his behind the scenes musicals and ridiculously showy set pieces, does very little to float my boat; I’ve always preferred the classic Technicolor MGM musicals of the forties and fifties to Berkeley’s films.  Having said that, though, I gladly make an exception for Footlight Parade.  In this musical, I understand more the magic that Berkeley was all about.  It doesn’t click in his other musicals for me, but it does here, in large part because of our leading man. 

Chester Kent (Cagney) is a producer of musical prologues.  You know, prologues!  Those live staged brief musical numbers you’d see at a movie theater before the feature?  You don’t know?  Ah, it doesn’t matter anyway.  Well, Kent is a former musical comedy stage producer reduced to putting on these prologues due to the success of the talkies, and he’s always trying to come up with new ideas and themes for these prologues.  His faithful, overworked, and loving secretary Nan (Blondell) guides him through dealing with his ex-wife, chasing away a new gold digger, anxious producers, and casting choices.  In the meantime, there’s corporate espionage, love blossoming on set between Ruby Keeler and Dick Powell, an overworked rehearsal director, and some ridiculous cat costumes. 

42nd Street

42nd Street
1933
Producer: Busby Berkeley
Starring: Ruby Keeler, Ginger Rogers, Una Merkel, Dick Powell, Bebe Daniels, Warner Baxter

I’m going to admit something right now that is going to make me incredibly unpopular in film blogger circles. I love musicals. I do, god help me. I was raised on them; they are the cinema of my childhood. A weekend afternoon wasn’t complete without Gene Kelly or Fred Astaire singing and dancing. They remain my ultimate cinematic feel-good flicks.

Having said all of that, though, I will now say that despite my adoration, all musicals are not created equal. I can’t get enough of the Golden Age MGM musicals, with all their Technicolor glory and extended fantasy ballet sequences, but give me Rodgers and Hammerstein and I will leave the room. Early Hollywood musicals, which started as soon as sound in film began, were one of two varieties. There were the “Let’s put on a show!” musicals, the type to which 42nd Street belongs, where all the musical numbers take place in the context of a stage act and have precious little to do with what is going on in the film. Because this is what Busby Berkeley liked to do, these types of musicals also typically involved a ridiculously stagey and showy final dance number. The other variety of musical is the type where the musical numbers further the plot; or at very least, deal with the plot. You know the kind, where the hero sings about how much he loves the heroine right after meeting her. A theater needn’t be a part of the plot of these musicals; they can be about anything, and the song and dance numbers fit in with the overall emotional arc of the film. Think René Clair’s 1931 duology of Le Million and À Nous la Liberté.

Guess what: I love the latter type of musical, and am really not a fan of the former.

In case you forgot, 42nd Street is the former.