VividSimon Simply Perfect

UnowPriceless hyped garbage

Listonixio Fresh and Exciting

RipDelight This is a tender, generous movie that likes its characters and presents them as real people, full of flaws and strengths.

kirksworks When I was in junior college I took a summer film class and the instructor showed films in the girl's gym every Friday night.  It was free and there was always a big turnout. What was interesting was the selection of films. They were all Hollywood films from the early 30s like "Duck Soup," "20th Century" and "Fury." A sizable part of the crowd didn't have much background in film, and certainly hadn't seen very many older films. This was in the late 60s or early 70s and the new wave of American films was just underway, so audiences were prone to laugh at the old fashioned movies of the past. And indeed they did, but after a few films a surprising thing happened. People started cheering at the end of the films, and even cheering at moments during the films. They were really surprised at how good they were, how adult they were, and how funny they were. By the end of the summer, an amazing learning experience had occurred. At least one audience had grown to understand the value of older movies. One of the films shown was "Footlight Parade which was initially received with guffaws, but ultimately Busby Berkeley won the audience over. He was a visual genius no one has matched, but the film is more than visual extravagance."Footlight Parade" has a very intricate plot unfolding in a face paced story with witty dialogue and physical performances by both James Cagney and Joan Blondell. I couldn't decide who was cuter, Blondell or the very young Ruby Keeler. There was even a comment on the greediness of big business when we discover the owners of the production company have been skimming off the top (basically, taking money from the hard working man - James Cagney and the rest - to line their own pockets).  If that doesn't relate to what is going on today I don't know what does.  The story builds to three song and dance routines, choreographed by Berkeley: "Honeymoon Hotel," "By a Waterfall," and "Shanghai Lil." Each one is spectacular in its own way. "Honeymoon Hotel" was very racy, showing all these couples having affairs with others in the hotel. It's all told in visuals and a very infectious song that alludes to all the sexual chicanery. Really impressive and funny. "By a Waterfall," good God, what can be said about this?!! Simply stated, it has choreographed female swimmers forming patterns in a large pool, but it was just about the most visually phenomenal phantasmagoria ever produced. How it was achieved boggles the mind. When the camera shoots down and shows the swimmers' kaleidoscopic patterns, it was truly remarkable, and when the overhead lights go off and the pool lights underneath go on we get this languid shimmering, silhouetted spectacle that was just beyond ethereal. The last number, "Shanghai Lil," has producer/director Cagney forced to dance when the lead performer is found drunk. This was Hollywood encouraging America to pull itself out of the depression and have faith in Roosevelt's New Deal. It was invigorating to say the least!! We need something like this now!!  James Cagney was just a joy, so energetic and fun. His dancing always impressed me.  He had a very individualistic style. I think I prefer his solo style to Fred Astaire's, and that's saying a lot, but Astaire's paired routines with Ginger Rogers and Rita Hayworth were the best. Joan Blondell had a field day with physical comedy. Her timing was impeccable. This film is so progressive in thought that it's hard to believe Cagney later became a Republican.  The three songs are easy to like. Very old style 1930s numbers indeed they are, but they're extremely catchy, transformed into little jewels of the era by Busby Berkeley's visual panache. Today's Hollywood may have CG dinosaurs, but they don't make 'em like this anymore.

richard-1787 I don't have anything original to add to the justified encomia others have offered for this remarkable movie.Watching it again tonight, I was, however, struck yet once again by the genius of Busby Berkeley in staging the last three numbers, the "prologues." Most remarkable of a very remarkable trio for me is "By a waterfall." It just keeps building and building and building. Yes, of course, some of the shots of the women in the water are very erotic. It was 1933, after all, and before the Hayes Code. Berkeley and Warner Brothers understood that pretty women posed erotically had a real appeal to men, But these erotic poses are not JUST erotic poses. They keep building and building and building. What will he do next, you wonder? Oh, that. But "that" is even more incredible than what has come before. By the time you get to the end of this number, you're exhausted, not just physically and erotically, but imaginatively as well. How could anyone have maintained and built on that suspense for 10 whole minutes? I can't tell you, but he did.Third of the three prologues, "Shanghai Lil," is definitely not something that could have been filmed the same way just a year or two later when the Production Code was put in force. We see an opium den, a lot of prostitutes, at least one interracial couple, etc. Having watched it again tonight, I will add that this is a strange "musical." There is almost no music for the first hour and a half. It's all in the three closing numbers. But what numbers!

steve-h-edelman "Footlight Parade" is the best of the backstage musicals. The grand finale of this 1933 film -- three unbelievable Busby Berkeley productions -- is the most entertaining 30 minutes of film ever produced. The songs are so good, the productions so lavish, and performances so full of heart, I can watch the finale over and over. Ruby Keeler plays so well to the camera in all three of these very different story-songs. "Honeymoon Hotel" is the first number, it's adorable. The second number, "By A Waterfall," is a climax before the climax, when the overhead camera captures hundreds of swimming of girls in amazing synchronized swimming to a beautiful tune. The music is wonderfully arranged and catchy, all three, but none more so than the grand finale, "Shanghai Lil." James Cagney, the producer of this show upon which so much depends, must replace the leading man at the last minute and of course puts it over in style. "Shanghai Lil" starts out in a wonderfully grimy bar, with opium and prostitutes, where AWOL sailor Cagney is looking high and low of his Shanghai Lil to that great melody. All three tunes have been going around in my mind constantly for a few months, that's entertainment.

chaos-rampant I am thankful for these so-called 'backstage musicals'; beyond their superficial charms, they have deepened the ways we imagine. Without knowing it they have provided us with some of the best essays about the endeavor to express, to make visible, the unfathomable contours of the heart.Once more we have a film about a filmmaker fighting to stage a vision, here a preshow as opening act for the first talkies. He's a grunt, always storming in and out of rooms, yelling directions, now and then pausing to show the steps to the troupe or scream at a phone; but always fretting about new ideas to stage. He's played by James Cagney, whom we know best from tough-as-nails gangster roles. It's very apt casting. Cagney had many expressive talents, and a violent energy with the intuitive power to carry these into a performance.But none of the ideas he comes up for the show seem like they've been very well thought out, they're all unfinished premises rushed with one foot out the door, so it's all a mystery how this strong-willed hack can give coherent shape to creative chaos. What kind of show he'll be able to put together. Money is staked on him, fortunes.He's surrounded by three women, one for each number he's called to improvise. One is an ex-wife out for leeching money, another is his loyal secretary secretly in love. All three are fighting to seduce or be seduced, money is at stake again, and the art made with them.It's all very enjoyable thus far, the rapid-fire banter and atmosphere of festive uproar. But it's not that it truly soars until we actually get to see on the stage how the various tribulations, that from our end so far seemed random and meaningless, were in fact shaping the vision that we get to see.We drive back and forth around town to see these; the first number is about newly weds in the 'Honeymoon Hotel' with marriage slyly perverted as illicit sex that ends with bedroom eyes and mock happiness which we know will not last, and didn't for him, the other is a scene from everyday life on the street transformed on stage into the most gaudy spectacle with wood nymphs frolicking beneath cascading waters.The third is the most stunning, because it substitutes for the internal processes that yield one happy end within another, both on the same stage. We knew our man was the author of these visions, the dreamer as it were, but was content so far to pull the strings from behind. Here an accident of fate forces him to get up on that stage and act out the part he was intuitively drawn to create: the number is about this man seeking out the woman of his dreams in a sort of smoky, semi-conscious stupor, and again the unforeseen circumstances - in this case, war - that keep love from them. Eventually he tricks both fates and us, the camera, to fulfill the dream.So the happy end meant to take place in reality is pure Hollywood fiction, while the pure Hollywood fiction of the song and dance number reveals from machinations inside the soul a true purpose outside.It is excellent stuff about the makings of images choreographed from the heart. Their power to articulate is this; art that reflects, salvages purpose from a life that appears incoherent, yet also reveals capricious fates of our own making that we have set in motion by simply living our part. Clearly this grunt could not have staged what he did, even with expert craft, if life around him had not seduced inspiration out of him.