The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, December 7-13
Footlight Parade (1933)
Directed by Lloyd Bacon
Bacon may be credited as the director, but by now it’s widely accepted that Busby Berkeley—the director and choreographer of its song-and-dance numbers—is this musical’s real auteur. Could that authorship, however, extend to the film’s backstage drama as well? Berkeley was celebrated more for his visual imagination than for his sense of humanity; perhaps Chester Kent (James Cagney), the fast-talking stage impresario at the heart of Footlight Parade, could be seen as a Berkeley analogue, with his ruthless willingness to manipulate and sacrifice anybody for the sake of his art. (Considering how many times Berkeley was married during his life, maybe Kent’s penchant for female objectification—one that reaches a zenith in the “By a Waterfall” number—reflected him as well.) And yet, just as Cagney is able to infuse the whole film with pedal-to-the-metal energy through sheer charisma, so is Berkeley able to momentarily silence criticisms—of political incorrectness (this is pre-Code 1930s, after all), of racial insensitivity, of sexism—through his taste for astonishing visual extravagance and exhilarating “can-you-top-this” chutzpah. Rarely has such artistic obsessiveness been made so damn irresistible. Kenji Fujishima (December 11, 2:25pm, 6:25pm; December 12, 12:40pm as part of Film Forum’s Busby Berkeley series. Sunday’s screenings are part of a 2-for-1 double feature with Gold Diggers of 1933)