Grand Old Movies

Although he became famous in films as a tough guy, James Cagney liked to think of himself as a song-and-dance man, and that’s the tack we take in our newest Grand Old Movies post on his 1933 musical, Footlight Parade. Cagney sings and dances in this film, but even between the music numbers he keeps the momentum going. In one scene he takes a phone call and, although he’s sitting down, he keeps stomping one foot in rhythm to the music; he literally can’t stop moving. His body is an instrument that won’t shut down. Whatever is going on in him, as actor and artist, is grounded in this instrument and finds kinetic expression there. It’s what make Cagney so memorably vivid onscreen. He brought a dancer’s energy to all aspects of his performing, even to his gangster characters, but it particularly comes to the fore in his musical roles. Especially in a pre-Code, Busby-Berkeley-choreographed musical like Footlight Parade, which combines a gritty, Depression-toughened vitality with a tongue-in-cheek naughtiness that even today leaves audiences giddy with delight. They really don’t make ‘em like this anymore.

Our post is part of the Cagney Blogathon, being hosted by The Movie Projector Blog from April 8-12, 2013. Please click here to read our post and for links to the blogathon page with a list of participating bloggers writing on Cagney’s films.

Who is Borrah Minevitch and why should you care? He was (to get to the facts) an actor, mime, and harmonica player, founder of the Harmonica Rascals. The Rascals, a group of all-harmonica-playing musicians, appeared in several films of the 1930s and 1940s. They were more than players; they were also clowns, who performed a brand of roughhouse comedy while swinging out sweet music on their mouth organs. They were terrific. And we can’t get enough of them. Visit our new Grand Old Movies post about them and you may be hooked, too. Please click here to read. 

As the above poster indicates, show business means Girls. The more the merrier, and the more of them on display, the better. That’s true of the film we look at at in our new Grand Old Movies blog post, the 1929 musical The Broadway Melody, MGM’s first all-talking, all-singing, all-dancing film, and the first musical to win a Best Picture Oscar. We definitely get the girls here, lined up in rehearsal, or lined up behind the leading man, or even lined up on a Roman barge (the set of one of the film’s musical numbers), wearing long blonde wigs and not much else. The Broadway Melody set many cinematic precedents, and the display of female flesh in song and dance is one of them. From here to Busby Berkeley is a straight line.

The film has the hoariest of plots, puttin’ on a show and making it on Broadway. But in its time, it was considered new and innovative (something to keep in mind watching the film today), and it was a box-office success as well as an Oscar winner. Central to that success is its star, Bessie Love (who also received an Oscar nomination), as a determined trouper entangled in a love triangle with her sister (her partner in her act, played by Anita Page) and boyfriend (Charles King, as a singer-songwriter). Love is a tiny dynamo, tough, wiry, and hard-edged; and she’s absolutely truthful in her acting—when, after realizing her boyfriend is no longer in love with her and she breaks down and weeps, she looks like a real human being, drab, puff-eyed, and worn by sorrow. She digs her character out of her core, giving a fearless and go-for-broke performance that almost burns through the celluloid. You feel if anyone can make it, she can.

The film also introduced several standards, including “The Broadway Melody,” “You Were Meant For Me,” and “The Wedding of the Painted Doll.” Sound familiar? They were all re-used in Singin’ in the Rain, a kind of Broadway Melody commentary, in which the puttin-on-a-show clichés are themselves re-used in a satire about the early days of sound—just about the time when The Broadway Melody was made. But the all-thumbs fumbling with sound put to comic effect in the later film are real in The Broadway Melody. Much of the singing looks to have been done live on camera (not pre-recorded), and you get the kind of intensity (as well as some off-key crooning) that later, more technically sophisticated musicals eschew. You also get to see a vaudeville specialty act almost unknown today, toe-tapping (tap-dancing on pointes), a technique of extremes that, viewed now, is like watching an odd and slightly sinister subspecies of show-biz history spring back into eccentric life.

Please click here to read our post.