Footlight parade shanghai lil movie#
Footlight parade shanghai lil code#

English music album Movies From Busby Berkely Volume 1. Having watched it again tonight, I will add that this is a strange 'musical.' There is almost no music for the first hour and a half. Shanghai Lil (from Footlight Parade) song by James Cagney, Ruby Keeler, Chorus now on JioSaavn. We see an opium den, a lot of prostitutes, at least one interracial couple, etc.

Footlight parade shanghai lil code#

Third of the three prologues, 'Shanghai Lil,' is definitely not something that could have been filmed the same way just a year or two later when the Production Code was put in force. Watch on YouTube Footlight Parade Comedy 1933 1 hr 43 min English audio CC BUY OR RENT Oscar-winner James Cagney ('Yankee Doodle Dandee,' 'White Heat') stars a fledgling producer who finds.

How could anyone have maintained and built on that suspense for 10 whole minutes? I can't tell you, but Berkeley did. By the time you get to the end of this number, you're exhausted, not just physically and erotically, but imaginatively as well. But 'that' is even more incredible than what has come before. What will he do next, you keep wondering? Oh, that. The number keeps building and building and building.

Footlight parade shanghai lil movie#

What must it have been like in 1933 on huge movie theater screens in the era before multiplexes? = But these erotic poses are not JUST erotic poses. First film where James Cagney dances - showing off his vaudeville and stage experience as a song-and-dance man. It was remarkably erotic on my 46' tv screen. All those shots of women opening and closing their legs. Those jets of water spurting up - I use the verb advisedly - between the swimming women's legs. Perhaps I paid closer attention to this number this time, perhaps I was just in the right 'mood.' Either way, I marveled at the suggestiveness of so much of it. Berkeley and Warner Brothers understood that pretty women posed erotically had a real appeal to men, - I watched the end of this movie again this morning. It was 1933, after all, and before the Hayes Code. Busby Berkeley, the greatest choreographer in Hollywood musicals. Yes, of course, some of the shots of the women in the water are very erotic. Footlight Parade - Shanghai Lil (1933) gerard tondu. Watching it again tonight, I was, however, struck yet once again by the genius of Busby Berkeley in staging the last three numbers, the 'prologues.' Most remarkable of a very remarkable trio for me is 'Beside a waterfall.' It just keeps building and building and building. I don't have anything original to add to the justified encomia others have lavished on this remarkable movie.