Review of Footlight Parade (1933) by Sera F — 17 Mar 2009

I know 42nd Street sounds unstoppable, but what it you pair Ruby Keeler with James Cagney, tap dancing across a bar? Exactly. This show is even more about show businessâ??Cagney is a man put out of the musical business by the success of the talking picture.

Rather than quit (though his wife quits him), he starts a new business: staging song-and-dance prologues for the moving pictures, complete with Live! Dancing! Girls! In pussycat costumes! In love slaves of the Orient costumes! In mermaid costumes! Joan Blondell plays his secretary and gal Fridayâ??in love with him though he doesnâ??t notice and instead takes up with her good-for-nothing â??friend.

â?? He has two business partners robbing him blind, but he doesnâ??t notice because heâ??s so devoted to his business. MAN can he dance! Watching him demonstrate the look he wants for the pussycat number, as compared to what the cigar-smoking rehearsal director had arranged (the man looks much more like a bookie than a rehearsal director).

. . Cagney is a physical genius, in and out of character. Keeler flaps her feet around and is supposedly really something, but sheâ??s as awkward as a baby chicken trying to fly, her scrawny legs flapping around and her scarecrow arms sticking out wildly.

Cagney is liquid music, sound in a body, completely and naturally free. Unlike his troupe of dancing girlsâ??someone is leaking his numbers to the competition, so for three days, while they prep for a big production, an audition of sorts for a contract with the biggest picture-house owner in the country, he shuts everyone in the studio on lockdownâ??thatâ??s right, fifty dancing girls sleeping on cots in the rehearsal studio, in their pincurls and nighties, running for breakfast.

You canâ??t beat a movie like this; it just doesnâ??t get better.