Lloyd Bacon (1933)

Footlight Parade was released by Warner Brothers just a few months after 42nd Street and the two films have several common features and contributors.  Both are putting-on-a-show musicals, with the main numbers coming not at regular intervals throughout but together in an extended finale.  Lloyd Bacon and Busby Berkeley are again in effect co-directors:  Bacon gets the sole directing credit but Berkeley is responsible for the musical numbers and, therefore, for virtually the whole of the last thirty minutes of the picture.  Ruby Keeler, Dick Powell and Guy Kibbee appear in each of the two movies, which both include songs by Harry Warren and Al Dubin.  Whereas that pair wrote the entire song score for 42nd Street, Sammy Fain and Irving Kahal are responsible for part – the weaker part – of Footlight Parade’s words and music.  The two Warren and Dubin efforts resonate with numbers in 42nd Street:  ‘Honeymoon Hotel’ corresponds thematically with ‘Shuffle Off to Buffalo’; the chords in ‘Shanghai Lil’ express the same sense of vividly inviting and amusing danger as the title song in 42nd Street.  (Again, it’s tantalising to hear the best tune being picked out on the piano during rehearsals for the show in preparation.)

A main strength of 42nd Street is the fusion of musical comedy with a sense of the dramatic reality of performers fighting to survive during the Great Depression.  Economic realities are essential to the plot of Footlight Parade too but the film is more concerned with the commercial challenges faced by musical theatre once talking pictures were established, as well as the looming threat of enforcement of the Motion Picture Production Code.  The live entertainments in Footlight Parade are musical prologues presented on the stage of movie theatres ahead of the main screen feature:  I assumed these prologues were therefore subject to the same pressure of encroaching censorship as the films they introduced.  The intersection of stage and screen is essential to the fabric of Footlight Parade.  The climactic numbers here, as in 42nd Street, are supposedly part of a live show but their spectacularism means they couldn’t possibly be staged in a theatre.  That paradox is apt, given the storyline.  It’s also inherently ironic, of course, that the medium of film is being used to dramatise the predicament of the makers of Broadway musicals confronted with the might of Hollywood.

One of the scenarists of 42nd Street, James Seymour, wrote Footlight Parade with Manuel Seff but the plotting is primitive and bitty and Lloyd Bacon’s direction isn’t either as penetrating or as tidy as in the earlier film.  Footlight Parade is still very entertaining, though.  The plethora of risqué  lines, dubious relationships and skimpy costumes lend the film a before-it’s-too-late quality that’s as close as it gets to the sustained urgency of 42nd Street.  Sally and I both had a cherished memory of James Cagney, dressed as a sailor, singing and dancing on a bar to ‘Shanghai Lil’, and of the camera moving along the row of social and racial stereotypes propping up the bar, each of whom has a comment or a query about the song’s elusive title character (‘Say, who the heck is Shanghai Lil?’ and so on).  In fact, these great highlights are embedded in an elaborate and extended number, with sailors brawling and other militia marching, which has a somewhat diluting effect.  ‘Honeymoon Hotel’ has witty lyrics and is amusingly done, although there’s rather too much of Billy Barty, the famous midget actor, as a baby (Barty was nine years old at the time).  ‘By a Waterfall’, which comes between ‘Honeymoon Hotel’ and ‘Shanghai Lil’ in the finale, is essence of Busby Berkeley but, with its meagre tune endlessly repeated, it grows tedious as the human bodies inevitably disappear into ingenious, dehumanised patterns.   The cat number (‘Sittin’ On a Backyard Fence’), including Billy Barty as a mouse, is enjoyably naff – although I wasn’t keen on the way the real cat in the company was handled at one point.

Footlight Parade is famous for providing James Cagney with his second best-known musical role after Yankee Doodle Dandy.  As Chester Kent, the driven creator of musical prologues, Cagney sings well and his stylised hoofing is elating but he’s not merely a song-and-dance-man here:  the film’s reliance on his abilities as an actor can hardly be overstated.  Cagney’s dynamism and command provide Footlight Parade with its heart – his lack of height gives him an underdog quality which is right for the up-against-it Chester and which makes you root for him.  Joan Blondell, as Chester’s smart and loyal secretary Nan, is a fine partner for Cagney.  Nan knows from the start she’s in love with Chester; it takes him the whole film to realise that he reciprocates.  Blondell is especially good at telling the audience, through her truthfulness and comic timing, yet not quite telling her boss her feelings for him.  Cagney reacts to Nan’s more significant remarks with a brilliant mixture of alertness and cluelessness:  he gets that she means something but, until the closing stages, can’t work out what exactly.  Chester’s short-lived fling with Nan’s no-better-than-she-should-be ‘friend’ Vivian isn’t up to much since Claire Dodd doesn’t suggest a gold-digger pretending to be classy; she just seems vacuously grand.

When Ruby Keeler, as Bea, a dancer-turned-secretary, takes off her specs, has her hair done and reverts to dancing, she doesn’t become glamorous so much as a different person; as in 42nd Street, Keeler can’t hold a characterisation.  Still, Bea’s prickly exchanges that blossom into romance with Dick Powell’s Scotty are agreeable enough and Powell is likeable, especially in the ‘Honeymoon Hotel’ number.  Even allowing for the mediocre script, some of the comic support is laboured but Hugh Herbert is fairly funny as a dim-witted censor and Frank McHugh, who plays the hypochondriacal dance director Francis, has a good bit when Chester gets Francis to sing (as he smokes a cigar) a love duet with Dick Powell – in order to show the chorus girls, about to audition to sing with Scotty, how it’s done.  James Cagney makes you laugh when he dismisses an alarmingly bel canto candidate for this number.  She indignantly tells him that she’s sung for crowned heads.  ‘You’ve laid yourself open for a crack there’, replies Chester Kane.  ‘But we’ll let it go …’

21 July 2014