Popular reviews

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  Review by Anna Imhof 🌸 ★★★★★ 8

  Not sure if it can get more Old Hollywood than watching this film at the Egyptian Theater on Hollywood Boulevard, at such a historic venue where many a film premiered back in the day, and under which roof countless stars and other industry people sat and looked up at the screen just like I did today.

  I got sick as soon as I arrived in Los Angeles, running a fever and feeling quite miserable, which was to be expected after two weeks of traveling from one cold city to the next, on freezing trains and drafty buses. But I simply had to drag myself out of my dormitory bed—with blanket in my bag—to see this Sunday's pre-Code double feature celebrating…

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  Review by Sam Van Hallgren ★★★★ 1

  Ridiculous fun; then transcedent. Berkeley is no joke. And Cagney - it's as if he's flown in from another dimension. Only Blondell can keep pace with him. It's like he's showing everyone the future of movie acting.

  Wish I could have recorded the six year old during "By a Waterfall." He could not. Believe. What. Was. Happening. "Oh my God, Bubbis Bakery. How are you doing that? How?!"

  Good question.

  Also what in God's name was going on in Honeymoon Hotel? So much to digest.

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  Review by Paul Elliott ★★★★ 2

  Footlight Parade features plenty of outstanding flares of comedy and music as well as providing James Cagney with his first on-screen singing and dancing musical role, and the entertaining pre-Code tongue in cheek dialogue merely enlarges the cheerfulness and fun.

  Cagney plays stage director Chester Kent, and the story follows him as he struggles with time as well as an unscrupulous competitor, who keeps ripping off his ideas, as he produces marvellous live musical prologue sequences to accompany screenings of early talkies. Lloyd Bacon’s fast-paced direction of a flimsy and familiar plot accounting a backstage tale about putting on a great show is nothing more than an excuse in connecting some intricate and extravagant Busby Berkeley helmed musical production numbers.…

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  Review by Bre ★★★★

  “As long as they have sidewalks, you’ll have a job.”

  Revisiting this as I get older and more tired, I realize just how relatable Frank McHugh is in this.

  This was the first classic film I really loved, long before I actually got into it. It still holds so much magic for me. It’s insanely sharp, relentlessly funny, and consistently magical.

  James Cagney is still top of the line for me. I thought he was just the most wonderful thing for the longest time, he is still my favorite song and dance man to ever be on film. 

  That moment where they reveal it’s Cagney that has gone on stage at the last minute to perform the “Shanghai Lil” number…

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  Review by Drew Edelstein ★★★½

  Here's a select few reasons why this movie kinda rules (and sadly, sometimes drools):

  - It uses the first ~60 minutes to indulge in delightful backstage dramatics, offering the 1930's equivalent of 30 Rock for theatrical musical prologues (which were apparently a thing in the olden days) with writing as witty as you could ever hope for from classic Hollywood.

  - It uses the final ~30 minutes to indulges in a series of musical numbers that are as logistically impossible as they are beautiful. This is the Busby Berkeley stuff, and this is the reason why this film is held in such high esteem.

  - The Human Waterfall (and the musical number it is a part of) is one of…

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  Review by Ryan Daniel ★★★½

  “You’re in Jersey City, not in Hollywood.”

  Although this is very much a product of the 1930’s, it’s also way ahead of its time. The musical numbers are awesome, but they only take up the last 30 or so minutes of the film. They’re still great, but I would have enjoyed more of the musical numbers and less of the story at the beginning, especially since it started to get pretty repetitive in parts.

  Not that this movie really does it, but I’ve noticed that every time New Jersey is referenced in a movie, it’s negative. I get it, easy target, but damn I’d rather live here than Wyoming or some shit.

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  Review by Sally Jane Black

  I thought I had seen this before, but it turns out, this is just one of several old musicals that I've just spent so much time YouTubing the dance sequences from that I think I've seen them before. This film is notable as a pre-Code film, but if you focus on much outside of the magnificent song and dance sequences, you're going to have to delve through sexism and some vague racial stuff that thankfully doesn't go anywhere.

  Fortunately, Busby Berkeley was in fine form for this one, to the degree that having seen these dance sequences before, I might as well have seen the film. There are some good lines between the sequences and before them, but "By a…

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  Review by bingo ★★★★

  the RELIEF i felt when he scrapped the "slaves in africa" number just to go into "SHANGHAI LIL"

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  Review by Rick Burin ★★★★ 3

  Warner made a heap of great musicals in the early '30s, with the likes of Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler crooning and hoofing, Guy Kibbee and co providing the comedy, and the incomparable Busby Berkeley designing the numbers.

  This one sometimes gets overlooked alongside 42nd Street and the Gold Diggers series, but it shouldn't, not least because it throws Jimmy Cagney into the mix and climaxes with the unique spectacle of three big back-to-back Busby Berkeley numbers.

  Honeymoon Hotel is tiresome smut, but the climactic number - Shanghai Lil - is great fun, with Keeler and Cagney tapping on a bar, and the middle one, By a Waterfall, is a sumptuous, extravagant, kaleidoscopic affair that shows the choreographer at the…

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  Review by Christopher Moore ★★★★½ 4

  I'll be on the level: I don't know how I've deprived myself of a Busby Berkeley film until now. What was I thinking? I feel like a significant gap in my 1930s knowledge has been filled. The numbers are absolutely euphoric. A honeymoon hotel, a waterfall, a bawdy dive bar, an opium den, James Cagney tap dancing - and legs, so many legs! And then there's Joan Blondell as a tough-minded dame who doesn't suffer fools gladly. Watching Footlight Parade in 2020 makes me wonder what audiences thought when they first saw it in 1933. I bet they were gobsmacked.

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  Review by sakana1 ★★★★½ 5

  I HAVE SO MANY FEELINGS RIGHT NOW.

  The first time I ever saw James Cagney was when my dad brought Yankee Doodle Dandy home to show me when I was a kid, and I watched it over and over again. Because of that, Cagney was a hoofer to me before he was anything else, and that what he’ll always be in my heart. His ferocious, almost frightening energy is positively thrilling here, and his confidence — and that of his character — makes the people both on and off the screen believe that anything is possible. And, when you combine Cagney’s manic, magnetic presence with Busby Berkeley’s out of control audacity, Footlight Parade becomes truly an artifact of its time, something to…

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  Review by Rafael "Parker!!" Jovine ★★★★

  ... And this is why you must always stay til the very end when watching a movie. Just WOW!
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  James Cagney plays all against type on this movie about a producer that sees his career coming to an end thanks to the talkies. One day, however, while shopping at the drug store he's presented with the wildest idea ever.

  This is the most surprising musical I ever seen in terms of layers. Normally these type of movies have a very straightforward structure, but this one just kept building upon and upon.

  Everyone who has a remote idea about who James Cagney is certainly know him for his job as a gangster, a criminal or an immoral man. He never…