It’s standard practice among film historians to set up an opposition between the musicals of Busby Berkeley and Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers. Until recently the preference was for the more intimate and individually graceful style of Astaire and Rogers. Their art was more personal than the monumental spectacles of Berkeley, and — so the argument went — they represented the progress of individuality as opposed to the relative anonymity of the masses of chorines in the Berkeley showstoppers. Recently it appears that the scale is moving back into a kind of balance, and maybe even tipping over toward Busby. The Berkeley films of the early 1930s are now viewed as cinematic revolutions — failed revolutions, maybe, since the smoother, slicker, cinematically conservative individual dance routines of Astaire-Rogers fit more easily into the consolidated Hollywood style. The more reasonable critics see all this as a historical continuum, the gradual replacement of collective entertainment spectacles of the early 20th century and the Great Depression by the capitalist focus on personal, individual identity-formation and romantic coupling.
That makes sense to me. I see a lot of Berkeley elements in the earlier Astaire-Rogers films, up to Follow the Fleet in 1936. But the constant emphasis on Berkeley’s spectacular musical routines distracts from the way the backstage stories of his best films emphasize the importance of art as work. Astaire and Rogers sometimes show their preparation for shows, but usually we have the sense that their dancing is completely instinctive and natural. That adds to their magic and grace, and maybe it’s the individualized equivalent of all those impossible stage-shows in Berkeley. Still, I love the way the great Berkeley spectacles have plots about organizing great projects, doubling the ideals and even the rhetoric of the New Deal.
The greatest Berkeley films — 42nd Street, Golddiggers of 1933, Footlight Parade, and Dames — were made, astonishingly, within a year of each other; the first three were all filmed and released in 1933. Berkeley and his story-directors (Mervyn Le Roy, Lloyd Bacon, and Ray Enright) worked simultaneously on separate soundstages, but even so, the thought of all those gigantic sets being constructed and chorines being rehearsed in such a short period of time is mind-boggling. Appropriately enough, all of the films’ plots are about prodigious energy and commitment in the service of art.
While it’s not my favorite, Footlight Parade strikes me as the most self-reflexive and autobiographical of them — an autobiography of a stage production that also stands in for the making of the very movie we’re seeing. Berkeley didn’t write the script, but studio writers often wrote screenplays intended for particular stars — that seems to be what’s going on here. Not only does Berkeley himself appear in a couple of shots, the central protagonist is clearly a version of him. Of the four films, this is the only one in which Dick Powell isn’t the main man. Here he plays a very minor role. It’s Jimmy Cagney at the center of things, talking, planning, moving — and channeling — a mile-a-minute. That movement is made visible by the camera itself. (Lloyd Bacon did most of the story direction, as he did in 42nd Street; he was a Warner company director with a reputation for speed.) Here’s a scene in which Cagney’s character, the show producer Chester Kent, speeds through the sets. It’s hard to imagine that Berkeley and Bacon did not collaborate on scenes like these, even if they were filming on distinct sets. Spaces are even more important than speed.
The plot itself is “auto”-biographical. Kent is trying to keep stage spectacles alive as movies replace them, by staging live prologues before the films are shown. That was a real practice, and Berkeley produced some of them. But just as the spectacular floor-shows that are supposedly occurring on stages and in cabarets diegetically expand into cinematic fantasy spaces, the diegetically live prologues (supposedly bulwarks against cinema’s imperialism) are the offending movies themselves. Footlight Parade wants the audience to understand that making a movie is not magic, it’s the collaborative work of living people. Kent-Cagney’s insistence that the cast and crew must dedicate themselves completely to producing three distinct prologues in three days echoes not only Berkeley’s practice of sequestering his cast and crew, but also reflects his own project of making three huge movies in a single year.
Each of the three final spectacles is very different from the others. I’m not crazy about all of them, but this one is pretty amazing.
