Footlight Parade

Footlight Parade (1933)

--Lloyd Bacon

This is another film that Busby Berkeley did choreography on and that also features Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler (see my other reviews or you might be confused? since I'm going to reference them). Anyway, there is a producer of musicals who finds that he can't get his numbers produced anymore because the film industry is killing the business. But, they have these things like little musical numbers before or in the middle of showing a film in movie theaters, so he decides to get into doing those and mass producing them so it makes more money for everybody. That's basically it.

The film itself is pretty fast-paced, which parallels the action of the producer guy who runs around trying to take care of all the problems and come up with ideas for new numbers. So it's interesting in that way. As far as a Busby Berkeley film, however, this one falls short. As with most of the films he works on, you only see his work in the final like 10 or 20 minutes of the film. The numbers are eventually really good and fun to watch, but the buildup to them is devoid of anything interesting in terms of choreography, which I didn't like. Seriously, when you get to the actual musical numbers in the water it's weird because it doesn't resemble anything they practiced during the whole film. Not to mention that most of it was in the water, which made me wonder where they practiced, because there wasn't a pool inside for most of the film. This also contributes to my previous comments during Berkeley films about the unreality of the numbers in relation to their supposed filmic audience. I did mean it about the awesomeness of the choreographed scenes at the end though, there's so fun times with synchronized swimming, if I were you, I would try to find clips of it and watch it, cause it's cool.

This film was also interesting in that my comments about Powell and Keeler's acting will be reversed. I thought in relation to Powell that this was a really lack-luster performance and that he was so much better in other films. But for Keeler it gave her a chance to break out of her dumb, innocent girl stereotype and I loved her as an office assistant/manager or whatever at the beginning and I was really sad when she gave that up to be a dancer and a singer. Oh well, for a few minutes it was really cool.

That being said, there were a lot of racist and sexist problems with this film. For one, women were always being referred to as "girls" and "children" (full grown women by the way), and they were made to act accordingly as can be seen when the producer locks everybody in the building and they "children/girls" are called for meals with bells and shouts and they all scramble like... children... and girls... it was really weird. But there were even more race-related problems. Like a lot.

First, the producer guy gets an idea for some chick about slave women and decides to make a musical number (that ohmygod thankfully we never see!) about women (here meaning white women, but since they are the neutral, unmarked in this film, it's just "women") as african slaves in black face where white men capture them. That's not even a joke. This is the guy's idea. Usually I don't say this, but this is totally a reason to be glad that I was born post-Civil Rights. How sickening. He also gets an idea for a prologue (that's what the musical numbers are called) from poor black kids playing in the street with a fire hydrant. He translates this (literally, since he says it aloud) as fountain water splashing over "beautiful white bodies". So, basically, this film presents a nice little portrait of white appropriation of black life. Have fun with that.

There's also one musical number that's entirely racist. It's called "Shanghai Lil" (do you see where this is going?). Shanghai Lil is a prostitute that some guy in the army met and now he's looking for her everywhere. She is referred to throughout the song as oriental, heathen, butterfly, prostitute, and "little devil". And she speaks in stereotypically broken asian prostitute stereotypes like "i miss you very much a long time". Didn't anyone have a problems with this? No. Honestly, this could probably be made as a musical number today and still work because the majority of white americans wouldn't see any problem with this. They'd be like "but it's true! Asian prostitutes!" And why do you think that kind of prostitution exists? Anyway, it's insulting to Asians, women, and prostitutes. Yay life.

That whole number eventually turns into some creepy ode to the military/government (I really don't differentiate between the two, let's be honest). People become a large flag, there's patriotic marching in form, it's just odd. Like, after seeing the subversiveness of the depression-related films of the '30's, it's just odd to see something so in-line with the media agenda. But maybe it had something to do with hope for better times through the military, I don't even know what I'm talking about anymore because it was only the early '30's and people didn't like WWI, so... I really don't know what this number was about. It was so awkward. It would be like watching some modern movie that just morphed into some pro-Bush material. Awk.

So yeah, I'm all for watching Berkeley's awesome choreography (Shanghai Lil being the exception, there was nothing awesome about that number), but this film had a lot of obvious problems, especially with race, that seem to go even beyond a lot of the problems regular race/gender/sexuality problems with films from this era. That's my final judgment.