numbers back-to-back-to-back: Honeymoon Hotel, the swimming pool-based number. The other players include such reliable Warner performers as Ruby Keeler, Dick Powell, Guy Kibbee and Frank McHugh.įOOTLIGHT PARADE, based on a screen play by Manuel Seff and James Seymour music and lyrics by Irving Kahal, Sammy Fain, Al Dubin and Harry Warren directed by Lloyd Bacon a Warner Brothers production. Click here to read The DVD Journals quick review of Footlight Parade. Cagney is forced to play the lead in the big "Shanghai Lil" number himself, and he steals the show. The rest of the film is a hilarious, snappy comedy with plenty of Pre-Code humor, di. With familiar backstage clamor the film describes the agony, confusion and suicidal haste required to prepare three units in as many days. Fence, Honeymoon Hotel, By a Waterfall and. Joan Blondell, his secretary, is secretly in love with him, although he is much too occupied to realize it.
Cagney is a producer of motion picture stage units in the story, frantically overworked, beset by the spies of rival producers, harried by acquisitive women and betrayed by greedy employers. But it is not until "Footlight Parade" has been struggling through its plot for more than an hour that the fragments of song, costumed nymphs and technical virtuosity are finally integrated in a complete performance.Mr. The book is an awkward rewrite of the backstage romances of three years ago, and the gags, when they are not dipping hopefully into vulgarity, wheeze with the discomforts of age.Its manufacturers, by crowding the screen with these musical comedy extravagances, might have achieved liveliness and an illusion of speed and thus keep the minds of its auditors off the film's basic aridity.
They rhyme "loving" with "turtle-doving," and blissfully declare that by a waterfall "I'm calling you-oo-oo-oo."The librettists have more to answer for. The songs prattle innocuously of first nights in the Honeymoon Hotel. In the shattering climax they defile patriotically to form the Stars and Stripes, Mr. There are enough beautiful girls to sink the Hippodrome stage, and they are smart, too. The dance geometries are complex enough to daze the unmathematical mind. Cagney, who used to be a gentleman of the ensemble himself, has not forgotten all he learned in the chorus of "The Grand Street Follies." His song-and-dance number in the closing minutes of "Footlight Parade" at the Strand is almost the sole compensation for a dull and turgid musical film.In the staple commodities "Footlight Parade" rumbles along with the elephantine splendor of its kind. The stars that hang high over Shanghai, lighting James Cagney's sultry search for Shanghai Lil, also reveal one more side of his astonishing versatility.
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