Footlight parade movie#

Smithical Marriage: en masse, in the 'Honeymoon Hotel' number.Oblivious to Love: Chester is amazingly slow to figure out that Nan is in love with him.The Musical Musical: Another typical Berkeley plot device, as Kent is busy coming up with various musical prologues.Obviously a Take That!, since pre-codes had problems with the censors. Moral Guardians: Charlie, the irritating, buffoonish in-house censor.Move it babe while I give it to Gladstone.' Then Thompson's girlfriend after Thompson quits to go to Gladstone. It Will Never Catch On: 'Aw, talking pictures, it's just a fad.'.Kent's partners are using accounting tricks to scam him out of the profits of their business. Gold Digger: The optimistically named Vivian Rich.The Glasses Gotta Go: if Ruby Keeler wants to be a showgirl.She's crazy in love with him but he doesn't notice. Nan: I know Miss Bi-Rich, if you remember. Curse Cut Short / Last-Second Word Swap.Call-Forward: In a meta sense, as Chester Kent basically comes up with the idea for Cats some forty-odd years before the real show.

Footlight parade movie#

As was typical for Berkeley, they are far more ornate than one would ever see on a stage, much less in a movie theater once again, Willing Suspension of Disbelief on the part of the audience is duly necessitated.

Busby Berkeley Number: And they are impressive.

Blowing Smoke Rings: Apolinaris the movie theater owner is doing this when Gould and Frazer are begging him to sign a contract.

The movie that Kent's partners take him to see is a real film, The Telegraph Trail, starring an obscure B-movie actor named John Wayne. Joan Blondell co-stars as his long-suffering secretary Nan Prescott, with Ruby Keeler and Dick Powell as two of his cast members.įrankly, this Excuse Plot serves no other purpose than to give a Busby Berkeley Number montage some substance.įootlight Parade was directed by Lloyd Bacon, with Busby Berkeley directing the giant musical numbers.

Kent, casting about for a means of saving his job, hits on the idea of creating live musical numbers to be shown as 'prologues' to main features in movie theaters.

James Cagney stars as Chester Kent, a musical theater director whose career is greatly threatened by the invention of talking motion pictures. musical featuring songs by Harry Warren and Al Dubin, though this time the songs were divided between them and Sammy Fain and Irving Kahal.