FOOTLIGHT PARADE (1933)
U.S. (Warner Bros.) 104m BW
Director: Lloyd Bacon
Producer: Robert Lord
Screenplay: Manuel Seff, James Seymour
Photography: George Barnes
Music: Al Dubin, Sammy Fain, Irving Kahal, Harry Warren, Walter Donaldson, Gus Kahn
Cast: James Cagney, Joan Blondell, Ruby Keeler, Dick Powell, Frank McHugh, Ruth Donnelly, Guy Kibbee, Hugh Herbert, Claire Dodd, Gordon Westcott, Arthur Hohl, Renee Whitney, Barbara Rogers, Paul Porcasi, Philip Faversham
The greatest of all Depression-era musicals, Footlight Parade is really two films in one. The first is a fast, funny backstage story about frantic efforts to stage live musical interludes at movie houses, with James Cagney in top form as a hard-driving producer too preoccupied to appreciate his adoring secretary (Joan Blondell). The second is a climactic juggernaut of three consecutive Busby Berkeley spectacles, the rigor of whose design is matched by their uninhibited imagery.
I will pass too quickly over Honeymoon Hotel, which takes a wholesomely naughty tour through an establishment devoted to conjugal bliss, and Shanghai Lil, which transforms rakish oriental decadence into rousing New Deal morale boosting, in order to concentrate on By a Waterfall. This aquatic rhapsody, featuring the glistening bodies and geometric group formations displayed by a bevy of water nymphs, pushes its central tension between form and flesh further and further until it reaches an abstract outer space where depth collapses. The distinction between air and water dissolves and human bodies mutate into elemental cell-like units. You can have the Star Gate climax of 2001: A Space Odyssey; when it comes to consciousness-expanding cinematic trips, Ill take a plunge into Berkeleys Waterfall. MR
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1930s
GOLD DIGGERS OF 1933 (1933)
U.S. (Warner Bros.) 96m BW
Director: Mervyn LeRoy
Producer: Robert Lord, Jack L. Warner, Raymond Griffith
Screenplay: David Boehm, Erwin S. Gelsey
Photography: Sol Polito
Music: Harry Warren
Cast: Warren William, Joan Blondell, Aline MacMahon, Ruby Keeler, Dick Powell, Guy Kibbee, Ned Sparks, Ginger Rogers
Oscar nomination: Nathan Levinson (sound)
Of the series of classic early 1930s Warner Brothers musicals featuring numbers by Busby Berkeley, Gold Diggers of 1933 is the one that most strongly evokes the Great Depression. The bawdy, wisecracking screenplay centers on struggling Broadway showgirls who do whats necessaryincluding the use of gold digging techniques on rich suckersto keep the wolf from the door. The films latter stages are dominated by three spectacular Berkeley numbers: the racy Pettin in the Park, elegant Shadow Waltz, and topical Remember My Forgotten Man.
An ironic disparity between onstage opulence and offstage economic crisis is established in the Were in the Money curtain-raiser, when a peppy paean to prosperity being rehearsed by coin-covered chorines is broken up by the shows creditors. The opening numbers correlation of sex and money foreshadows the climactic Remember My Forgotten Man, in which a streetwalker (Joan Blondell) laments the common mans closely-linked losses of earning power and sexual virility, in poignant contrast to his forgotten World War I military glory. With its partisan references to the controversial 1932 Bonus March of jobless veterans and its vivid tableaux connecting war, emasculation, and unemployment, Remember My Forgotten Man is one of Hollywoods hardest-hitting political statements of the 1930s. MR
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1930s
SHE DONE HIM WRONG (1933)
U.S. (Paramount) 66m BW
Director: Lowell
Sherman
Producer: William LeBaron
Screenplay: Mae West, Harry Thew, John Bright, from the play Diamond Lil by Mae West
Photography: Charles Lang
Music: Ralph Rainger, Shelton Brooks, John Leipold, Stephan Pasternacki
Cast: Mae West, Cary Grant, Owen Moore, Gilbert Roland, Noah Beery, David Landau, Rafaela Ottiano, Dewey Robinson, Rochelle Hudson, Tammany Young, Fuzzy Knight, Grace La Rue, Robert Homans, Louise Beavers
Oscar nomination: William LeBaron (best picture)
In the early 1930s, Hollywoodbeset with financial difficulties and production problems related to the conversion to sound cinematurned to stage performers of proven popularity to lure customers back to the theaters. Among the most notable of these was Mae West, whose play Diamond Lil (which she wrote as a kind of showcase of her several talents) was immensely successful on Broadway and elsewhere. West proved a happy choice for Paramount because her unique brand of sophisticated if bawdy humor easily translated on screen; her first film, Night After Night (1932), was a big hit with audiences. Wests antics, especially her famous double entendres and sleazy style, offended religious conservatives of the time and hastened the foundation of the Breen Office in 1934 to enforce the Production Code (promulgated, but widely ignored, in the early 1930s). Wests post-1934 films, although interesting, never recaptured the appeal of her earlier work, of which She Done Him Wrongthe screen adaptation of Diamond Lilis the most notable example, even garnering an Academy Award nomination.