Footlight Parade

When sound arrives the Broadway musicals collapse and the producer Chester Kent finds new work: making short live shows to be staged in cinemas before the picture. Rivals steal his ideas, so he locks his company inside a building and sets about preparing three shows at once. Lloyd Bacon directed, but the real show is Busby Berkeley's choreography, and the sequence shot in a water tank with hundreds of dancers is the best-known example of his method of turning human bodies into geometric pattern seen from above. James Cagney leads and performs his own dancing. The hardest thing about it now is the racist representation used in one of the closing numbers. The working tempo of the Depression is directly inside the story. Who it is for: viewers who like classic Hollywood musicals and Berkeley's choreography. Who it is not for: anyone unable to overlook the racist scenes of the period.