72. Footlight Parade (1933)

Directed By Lloyd Bacon

Synopsis

James Cagney comes up with a company which makes musical prologues to talkies. In the effort to obtain a big contract he puts on the best prologues ever made. There's some shit about relationships in it as well.

Review

Lloyd Bacon can suck my balls frankly. He's just a run of the mill director and although this film was much better written than 42nd Street it was still pretty uninteresting until Busby Berkeley got his hands on it directing the three huge production numbers at the end.

The film is basically worth watching because of the aforementioned 3 musical numbers at the end. And it is very much worth watching because of them. It's hard to overrate the genius of Busbby who directed the musical numbers, in fact they are still extremely visually impressive in our days of CGI and huge special effects.

Busby is a genius in making musical numbers for the screen; of course there is a great big rip with the film's plot in the musical scenes, particularly because they would never work on stage, they need the camera to be seen from above, to catch the little details and to get a sense of the hugeness of the sets and choreography.

There is a stand out number, the middle one, By A Waterfall which is simply amazing and also very risqué - there's a lot of half naked wet ladies and lady's crotches on show and then the choreographies are simply amazing. It's a kaleidoscope of naked legs probably best experienced on drugs. By A Waterfall is the most visually impressive thing that I've seen up until now on this list; you are simply wide-eyed with amazement. I can't praise it enough. A pity that the rest of the film doesn't have the same standart of quality. Of course Cagney is great in it, but the other actors not so much, the dialogue is funny and fast paced and that's about it. Buy it from Amazon UK or US.

Final Grade

8/10 (the Busby Berkeley scenes are a 10)


Trivia

Trailer




From Wikipedia:

The film is considered one of the Pre-Code era. Considering the year of production and the popular perception that the musical genre is more family-oriented, the film's humor is quite risque, with multiple references to prostitution and suggestions of profanity largely unseen in studio films until the 1960s (when the Hays code collapsed).