Footlight Parade

Audience Reviews

View More

Kyle M @RT77296778 Apr 29 James Cagney’s electrifying performance, equally complemented by Joan Blondell’s sharp charisma, buoys this more whimsically engaging musical that that definitively transcends its year’s lineup, even if it’s not sensational per conceptually prompted. (B+) See more Ads T @RT11627483 04/30/2025 While the plot is inconsequential, Footlights Parade is one big production number featuring lavish sets, animations, and hordes of scantily-clad starlets performing perfectly synchronised choreography blurring the lines between code and pre-code Hollywood. As such, it's an entertaining picture and a memorable one for James Cagney. See more Xian C @Filmclass 04/22/2025 The pool numbers! Any Buzby Berkeley dance number! See more Alec B @Alec97 01/09/2024 Occupies a strange space between pure fantasy and a realistic portrait of the daily work of show business. Cagney gives remarkably complex performance given how silly the whole thing is. See more David K @RT61474040 04/26/2023 This is a terrific movie. Yes, the plot is thin but it's not about the plot. It's all about all of the great songs and Busby Berkeley choreography. Truly a one-of-a-kind figure in Hollywood. All the regulars - Dick Powell, Ruby Keeler, the fabulous Joan Blondell, and the great Jimmy Cagney doing what you don't get to see Cagney do that much - sing and dance. What a treat! See more michael d @RT16138633 12/15/2021 FOOTLIGHT PARADE (Warner Brothers, 1933), directed by Lloyd Bacon, with dance direction by Busby Berkeley, is the third of the Warner Brothers backstage musicals, following 42nd STREET and GOLD DIGGERS OF 1933, and while the plot by now is getting predictable with the show must goes on theme, the production numbers that take up the last 40 minutes of film make up for it. Movie tough guy James Cagney stars as Chester Kent, a famous director of stage musicals on Broadway, who finds he might be out of the job because of the advent of talking pictures, which is becoming big business over the now passé' stage shows. Kent, who works for Al Frazier (Arthur Hohl) and Silas Gould (Guy Kibbee) productions, comes up with the idea of staging "prologues," (musical shows that precede a feature movie), but the hardest thing for Kent to do is to think up how to have them presented. During the course of the story, Kent has female troubles: his wife, Cynthia (Renee Whitney) who wants to divorce him; Nan (Joan Blondell), his loyal secretary who secretly loves him; and Vivian (Claire Dodd), a former friend of Nan's out to gold dig on Chester, almost becoming a fly in her web. As Kent burns himself out in prologue preparation, he finds his ideas are being stolen by an employee who gives it to a rival producer; and Kent's other secretary, Bea (Ruby Keeler), a former vaudeville headliner, returns to the stage after getting groomed up from a bespectacled homely sort with close-cropped hairdo to a charming looker with liberated ideas, mainly because she now has her eye on a young protégé, Scotty (Dick Powell), who gets promoted to leading man of the Chester Kent prologues. During the dress rehearsals, songs "Ah, the Moon is Here" and "Sitting on a Backyard Fence" (written by Sammy Fain and Irving Kahal) are performed. Then with his female problems resolved, Kent succeeds into keeping his staff rehearsing day and night before the Broadway tryout night in order to prevent his ideas from ever leaving the theater. The highlight of the movie begins with the curtain rising, followed by three lavish production numbers back to back, which gets better with each passing performance. The first prologue is the somewhat mediocre "Honeymoon Hotel" (written by Harry Warren and Al Dubin) with Powell and Keeler as a couple who musically encounter comedic and romantic moments while on their honeymoon in a hotel in Jersey City; "By a Waterfall," (written by Fain and Kahal) the second prologue, starts with Powell and Keeler singing the tune before it changes into a lavish water ballet with hundreds of bathing beauties doing geometric patterns and perennial twisting snakes effects before forming into a human fountain. This number alone, worth the price of admission, predates the MGM/ Esther Williams swim musicals by a decade, but without going overboard. The final prologue, "Shanghai Lil" (written by Warren and Dubin) features Cagney (substituting for an appointed leading man who becomes drunk), as Bill in Shanghai who looks high and low for his Shanghai Lil (Keeler). After a barroom brawl, he finds her, sings the title song and goes into a tap dance number before the bugle sounds recalling all sailors to return to their ship. This is highlighted by military march formations and shot gun salute. All three prologues run about ten minutes each. What makes FOOTLIGHT PARADE interesting to see today is looking back at when it was made (1933), only a few years after talking pictures have taken over the screen, and how advanced the choreography has become since the 1929/30 movie musical days, thanks to Busby Berkeley. Character actors, such as Frank McHugh as the assistant dance director; Hugh Herbert and Ruth Donnelly; along with Billy Barty participating in two numbers, all do their best in the comedic moments. Inasmuch as Joan Blondell and Claire Dodd were screen beauties in their day, somehow the headdress they were presented here make them appear a bit older than their true age. And look closely in the earlier portion of the story where Cagney, Kibbee and Gordon Westcott go into a movie theater to watch the finish of a "talking" picture that's playing, a western featuring John Wayne, Frank McHugh and Marceline Day in THE TELEGRAPH TRAIL. Thanks to frequent television and theatrical revivals over the past decades, FOOTLIGHT PARADE has, and remains, a favorite movie musical past-time. See more Read all reviews

Footlight Parade

My Rating

Read More Read Less WRITE A REVIEW EDIT REVIEW POST RATING