A Film Canon

In Footlight Parade, the musical finally brings a satisfactory masculinity into being and, in doing so, renders itself redundant, explaining the shift in focus to 'prologues' - condensed theatrical segments that preceded film screenings - as well as the replacement of any residual romanticism with the streetsmart business banter of James Cagney, whose machismo transforms tap dancing into an effusion of raw, aggressive testosterone. His greatest moment comes in the second act, when, in a single, violent gesture, he supervenes co-partners, musical director, crew and cast, barricading them in the studio for three days to achieve the 'superhuman' feat of three entirely new prologues. These conclude the film, and are more integrated into the plot and with each other than any of Busby Berkeley's previous sequences, allegorising the very return of conventional sexual fantasy that Cagney has effected. Hence his last-minute replacement of the principal lead in the final number, "Shanghai Lil", which builds upon the sexual anticipation of "Honeymoon Hotel" and the wet, semi-naked bodies of "By A Waterfall" to explicate the militarism implicit in his 'barricade', depicting a soldier distracted from his oriental lover by the call of fraternal duty. This fantastic dimension precludes any attempt to make the spectacles theatrically plausible, resulting in a number of perspectives that couldn't possibly reflect any vantage point in the theatre, such as the underwater shots in "By A Waterfall". That said, this sequence is Berkeley's most transcendent moment, moving beyond the poetic gradations of Gold Diggers' "Shadow Waltz" to choreograph water into submission.