He decides that live action “prologues” for films are the ticket to his renewed success and so the folly begins. The film centers around a Broadway director whose career is flopping as audiences cease their trips to the theater in favor of going to the movies. Some of Berkeley’s most memorable film scenes include feats that simply couldn’t be achieved in real life, like the choreography for dancers in giant white Jenny Lind rocking chairs from Gold Diggers of 1933or his extravagant couples dance scene from Fast and Furious (no relation to the modern franchise) featuring dozens of tap dancing women dressed in scandalous harem costumes.īerkeley’s 1933 film, Footlight Parade, was one of these films that set the imagination flying. During the Great Depression many people sought the cheap seats and air conditioning that going to the movies offered, not to mention the escapism of fantasy and whimsy. One of the masters of this latter style was the choreographer, Busby Berkeley, who was able to create movie scenes that literally awed people. Film productions ranged from more humble dramas to glamorous musicals filled with every conceivable type of glitter and glitz. It's all in the three closing numbers.Many Hollywood films of the 1930s could be truly dazzling spectacles. Having watched it again tonight, I will add that this is a strange "musical." There is almost no music for the first hour and a half. We see an opium den, a lot of prostitutes, at least one interracial couple, etc. Third of the three prologues, "Shanghai Lil," is definitely not something that could have been filmed the same way just a year or two later when the Production Code was put in force. How could anyone have maintained and built on that suspense for 10 whole minutes? I can't tell you, but Berkeley did. By the time you get to the end of this number, you're exhausted, not just physically and erotically, but imaginatively as well. But "that" is even more incredible than what has come before. What will he do next, you keep wondering? Oh, that. The number keeps building and building and building. What must it have been like in 1933 on huge movie theater screens in the era before multiplexes? = But these erotic poses are not JUST erotic poses. It was remarkably erotic on my 46" tv screen. All those shots of women opening and closing their legs. Those jets of water spurting up - I use the verb advisedly - between the swimming women's legs. Perhaps I paid closer attention to this number this time, perhaps I was just in the right "mood." Either way, I marveled at the suggestiveness of so much of it. Berkeley and Warner Brothers understood that pretty women posed erotically had a real appeal to men, - I watched the end of this movie again this morning. It was 1933, after all, and before the Hayes Code. Yes, of course, some of the shots of the women in the water are very erotic. Watching it again tonight, I was, however, struck yet once again by the genius of Busby Berkeley in staging the last three numbers, the "prologues." Most remarkable of a very remarkable trio for me is "Beside a waterfall." It just keeps building and building and building. I don't have anything original to add to the justified encomia others have lavished on this remarkable movie.
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