Footlight Parade (1933)

I have to admit that I'm gay for Hollywood Musicals. Not all musicals; modern offerings like Rent, Hairspray and Dreamgirls didn't light me up the way I was hoping they might. Instead, I'm talking specifically about Old School Hollywood Musicals: Singin' In the Rain, West Side Story, The Sound of Music, stuff like that. Now add to that list the musical-comedies of the 1930's.

The short story is that Busby Berkley is 100% movie-crack. If you love movies and particularly old movies, Footlight Parade is sort of like making a meal of the icing and leaving out the birthday cake. This stuff will rot your teeth, but in the meantime it's so sweet, delicious and energizing that it'll leave you running around the backyard for hours as your parents try to get you to bed. In fact, I finished Footlight Parade last night weeellllll past my bed-time, but when the hat-trick of Berkley musical numbers begins in the last 30 minutes of the movie, there is no way to shut it off. I quite literally went to sleep and dreamed about the architecture of dancers and water fountains. I can still hear the songs, stuck in my head the way the best stuff sticks. Like I said: I'm gay for this stuff.

I should point out that I'm already built to love this kind of music. I am shameless Sinatra fan and find most popular music of the 30's and 40's to be honey to the ears. I get a feeling listening to this kind of music that nothing else provides; I have wide musical tastes, love most of what I hear (both old and new), but it's the pre-Elvis warblers that are my comfort food. So it is that listening to Dick Powell belt a tune like Honeymoon Hotel, something that would turn off a huge chunk of modern audiences with its sugary earnestness, gets me there everytime. The music is so sincere. The lyrics are clever and playful. Much like the crackling dialogue of a 40's Huston film, no one writes tunes like this anymore.

There's an awful lot going on in Footlight Parade, oodles of characters and miles of sub-plots criss crossing each other like backstage traffic. However, in my mind, there are two crowning elements that rise to the top of the din and make this musical an immediate favourite. The first is James Cagney who jawbones over 80% of the film like a pit bull with a poodle. I've never seen Cagney in a movie before but you can bet I'll be hunting down his key catalogue as soon as possible; it's the manner in which he spits dialogue (like bullets from a gun), moves across a room (like a pint-sized bull charging a matador) and holy crap...dances! There are a lot of great movie stars from this era, but not a lot that control the screen like this. Cagney's performance is like watching an electrical charge.

The second, and most important piece of Footlight Parade are those freakin' insane dance numbers that ransack the film in the last act. Prior to this, I was beginning to wonder if I was watching a musical at all; there's very little singing or dancing in the first 90 minutes of the film. But once the music takes over, Footlight Parade jumps the guard-rail and takes off into the air. There are three musical interludes that take place, virtually back-to-back, each more ridiculous than the first. Perhaps the most amusing conceit is that we are meant to believe these numbers are happening on stage before a live theatre audience. However, the magic is that everything Busby Berkley does is crafted for the single movie camera; the scope of which can only fit on a massive movie theatre screen.

All three musical numbers are spectacular, but it's the second of the three which is the masterpiece. The song begins with Dick Powell and Bea Thorn daydreaming by a waterfall in a romantic interlude so guileless that it could only happen in a musical number. As Dick drifts off to sleep, the performance quickly expands until the screen is overcome with leggy dancers diving, reclining, swimming and sliding down a massive waterfall set. Then the architecture takes over: the girls begin to dive into a pool so monumental that they've clearly relocated from a set into the subconscious mind. They begin to stack and twist around each other until they no longer seem to be human bodies. Birds-eye photography shows them coming together and separating in human sculptures that must have been awesome to coordinate and rehearse. In fact, it'd be easy to dismiss it as a sort of canny sychronized swimming, except for the fact that it's far more heady and dream-like than that. Frankly, watching it I found myself drifting away into a sort of hypnosis that only the best movie-experience can provide. I lost track that I was watching a movie at all, slipped away from the world around me and reached that semi-sleep mode that occurs in the early morning as you shake off the dreams from the night before (recall that this was very late at night so I quite possibly was!)


I realize this makes Footlight Parade sound like quite the head-trip, and you'll have to believe me that it sort of is. I'm working my way now through a Busby Berkley box-set and on the strength of Footlight Parade, have become hungry for more. I'll likely be watching 42nd Street in the coming week and will be hoping to recapture the same sort of waking musical dream. Like I said...movie-crack.

The Bourne Ultimatum (2007)

Can you think of any other Hollywood trilogy that improves movie-to-movie, peaking with the third and final installment? Obviously, in a perfect dramatic world, this is the way that it should always be; however it's usually the opposite story as sequels suffer from the problem of diminishing narrative returns. In this summer stuffed with three-quels that don't deliver (and in most cases, damage) the promise of the franchise, The Bourne Ultimatum is unique. Part three of the Bourne franchise is the high watermark of the series.

One thing that The Bourne Ultimatum does exceptionally well is to acknowledge its place in the continuity of the series without leaning too heavily on the earlier films for inspiration. There's no doubt that Identity and Supremacy inform every minute of the film, and the movie offers tremendous rewards to fans of the earlier movies, but this isn't a formula movie that is content to run the bases again for an easy home run. In fact, Greengrass' film is tremendously sophisticated in the way that it wraps itself in all of "what came before" by offering sly references to the Bourne history without simply recycling (two favourite moments immediately come to mind, both with the deja vu written clearly on Bourne's face: once as he watches Julia Stiles' character dying her hair; the other as he faces a would-be assassin behind the wheel of a car). At first pass, it would be easy to mistake these familiar echoes as the beginnings of the sequel formula - the director has begun repeating the same plot elements - however everything in Ultimatum is played at a slightly different pitch. Yes, there's another car chase, another grapple with the police, another opportunity for Bourne to scope out his pursuers from a rooftop across the street. But one gets the sense that all of this is done with a canny sense of history repeating. [And Lordy, the less said about those brilliant final shots of the film...the better.]

Despite all this, Greengrass' greatest accomplishment is his ability to sustain an unbearable level of tension for almost 120 minutes. It's a bit like listening to a virtuoso musician hold the high note for an entire performance: after a while, the act itself becomes awesome. Never mind that it's virtually impossible. The performer makes it appear easy and natural. Greengrass does the same trick by opening the film already running at full sprint, and then never giving the characters any downtime. Simply put, there's no bathroom breaks in The Bourne Ultimatum for anyone. The movie moves too fast to do anything but react for 2 hours.

The heartiest example of this is the protracted foot-chase through Morocco which seems to intensify well beyond the point of reason, and then still continues to turn the screws. I can't begin to guess how long the sequence takes to play out (one of Greengrass' superhuman abilities is the manner in which his editing makes time fly) but when Bourne and his assailant finally start grappling, you realize that you haven't taken a breath in 15 minutes. And that fight? Maybe top 10 ever. No hyperbole. Every punch makes the theatre seats shake.

Performances in the film are top-notch and for proof of how strong the Bourne franchise has become, you need only look at the talent it attracts. Matt Damon has already proven himself to be a rich and complex Jason Bourne, but the addition of David Strathairn, Paddy Considine, Scott Glenn and Albert Finney to the cast are masterstrokes. Strathairn in particular brings his top game, creating a heel that is devilish without ever resorting to action-movie cliché. Joan Allen is also wonderful, finding new notes in the Landry character and finding a new relationship to Bourne from that of the second film.

It's been said that Matt Damon doesn't intend to return to the Jason Bourne character and like a lot of recent summer blockbusters, the studio has been pretty clear that this is intended to be a finite trilogy. It's one of those rare instances where even after a movie this great, I hope they hold to their word. The world doesn't need any Bourne film after this; the series has reached an indefinable climax and to be the perfect cynic, there's nowhere to go in Movie #4 but back down to earth. Paul Greengrass and Matt Damon are at the top of their game, yet I'm still dubious that they could hit this level again. Ultimatum is truly awesome stuff.