Delayed Reaction: Footlight Parade

Premise: A director puts together a trio of movie prologues to sell to a distributor.

One of my ongoing missions is to see every movie featured in The Great Movie Ride, formerly at Walt Disney World: my favorite attraction there until they replaced it recently. Footlight Parade is a special one because I never got to see that portion of the ride fully functional. All I ever saw was a stationary human waterfall they moved to B-mode after years of malfunctioning. Anyway, it's as good a reason as any to introduce myself to the Busby Berkley musicals.

No need to be delicate here. You can throw away the entire first half of the movie. James Cagney, Joan Blondell, Ruby Keeler, and company are fine and all. It has some OK place setting. It established the different characters and relationships well enough. There are a few decent jokes. But no one is watching Footlight Parade for the talky first half. It's just filler. The movie comes alive when it gets to the three prologues. "Honeymoon Hotel" is an earworm that's so incredibly pleasant that I want to leave it on in the background as I work on anything. The synchronized swimming routines in "By the Waterfall" are mesmerizing. It's strange that that become a whole subgenre of movies for a while. It's such a specific idea that you'd think they'd quickly run out of ideas to include women swimming in formation, but it sure is impressive to watch. The "human waterfall” really is a showstopper too. "Shanghai Lil" was my least favorite of the three, yet even that is catchy and has a fine tap routine. Obviously, a lot in this movie hasn't aged well. "Shanghai Lil" is practically yellow-face, and I'm sure if I paid closer attention to the lyrics of "Honeymoon Hotel" I'd find some terribly antiquated lines in there. Assuming you can excuse that as a relic of that time period, those numbers are really grand. I'm a lot more curious to check out other Busby Berkeley musicals now.

Verdict: Weakly Recommend