11/8/25

Footlight Parade

Directed by Lloyd Bacon (1933)

Intro/Outro by Bruce Goldstein, Film Forum’s Founding Repertory Director

The third of the great Warner Bros./Busby Berkeley musicals, Lloyd Bacon’s Pre-Code Footlight Parade stars James Cagney as Chester Kent, a fast-talking Broadway director forced to reinvent himself to survive the new world of motion pictures. He devises “prologues” — elaborate live musicals performed in movie houses before features — as a way to stay afloat, while battling greedy producers, rival spies, and relentless deadlines, while his loyal secretary (Joan Blondell) vies for his affection. 

The film is a vehicle for Berkeley, whose experience with military drills made for choreographies that could only be translated through the language of film – camera angles, lighting, editing and dozens of beautiful chorus girls arranged in geometrical patterns are what matter most. The film’s three climactic musical spectacles — “Honeymoon Hotel,” “By a Waterfall,” and “Shanghai Lil”  — are each more ambitious and dreamlike than the next. Bacon, who in the 1920s was directing for Mack Sennett, keeps the comedy snappy and Cagney, usually typecast as a tough guy, gets to show off his vaudeville roots.

35mm print courtesy of Library of Congress