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.
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