The World According to Busby Berkeley: “Garp” and “Footlight Parade”

I don’t ever walk out on movies in theatres, even when they fail to fulfill my expectations. But there are times when, sitting on my couch at home, I realize it’s just not worth my time to continue watching something I find dreary. Such was the case with The World According to Garp, George Roy Hill’s 1982 adaptation of John Irving’s bestselling saga about eccentric people and random acts of violence. Never having read the novel, I can’t comment on the film’s fidelity to its source. But such actors as Robin Williams in the title role, Glenn Close (in her screen debut) as his gutsy mother, and John Lithgow as a star-football-player-turned-transsexual are always fun to watch—until they aren’t. When the opening scene introduced a charming cameo by stage greats Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy as Close’s parents, horrified by her flouting of social convention to the point of fainting dead away, I was ready to buy into the whole megillah. But approaching the two-hour mark, I’d had enough.

 Which is why I turned to something reliably amiable: the 1933 Warner Bros. pre-code classic, Footlight Parade. Like other Warner Bros. musicals of this era—including 42^nd Street and Golddiggers of 1933—Footlight Parade features clunky tap-dancing by Ruby Keeler and gags galore by other members of the WB stock company. Story? There’s always a bit of romance and a bit of back-stage drama. But what’s important is that these films, reveling in the opportunity presented by the coming of sound to the motion picture industry, lean heavily on exotic musical numbers choreographed by the P.T. Barnum of Hollywood musicals, the man with the unlikely moniker of Busby Berkeley. This is especially true of Footlight Parade, in which the three most audacious numbers are presented, one after another, to form the film’s climax.

 As always, there isn’t much plot. James Cagney, calling upon his naturally authoritative presence as well as his past career as a song-and-dance man, is a producer/director of Broadway musicals. Because they’re being replaced in the public’s mind with motion-picture talkies, his business is on the rocks . . . until he realizes he can produce the live-action “prologues” then popular on the motion picture circuit, as lead-ins to the feature films. His wife has left him; his smart, sassy secretary (Joan Blondell) quietly pines for his love. Meanwhile an upstart young tenor (Dick Powell) gets his big break, and discovers he’ll be playing opposite another office staffer (Ruby Keeler), who downplays the fact that she’s an ace musical performer. But what’s really urgent is Cagney proving his mettle by staging three elaborate prologues for a wealthy would-be backer on one New York evening.

 The three production numbers presented back-to-back-to-back are pure Busby Berkeley. The first, “Honeymoon Hotel,” is a naughty little fantasy about two just-marrieds capering through a hotel full of knowing lovers, all of whom have registered as Mr. and Mrs. Smith. The last, in which Cagney shows off his terpsichorean talents as a sailor looking for his Shanghai Lil, features Keeler impersonating a cute China doll in ways that today would seem appalling. The most classic Berkeley of the bunch is “By a Waterfall,” showcasing scores of beautiful blondes in skimpy attire. They cascade joyfully into a pool, and then reassemble for a kaleidoscopic water ballet. What we see on screen—the crane shots, the underwater filming—would of course be impossible in an actual theatre. This movie may be a salute to live entertainment, but only motion pictures could bring these dazzling moments to life.

 

 

 

An Autumnal Tribute to “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”

Anita Louise as Titania, the Fairy Queen

As a long-time theatre buff, I’ve been suffering serious withdrawal symptoms during the pandemic. The few opportunities I’ve had to see actors on stage have been outdoor performances, sometimes awkwardly staged in parking lots. But I did celebrate the end of summer with a Midsummer Night’s Dream in the most magical locale you can imagine. Topanga Canyon’s Theatricum Botanicum was founded in 1973 by the actor Will Geer (Grandpa on TV’s The Waltons). Blacklisted during the McCarthy era, Geer had moved his family to the wilds of Topanga to live off the land. Eventually, their domain became an artist’s colony, and the site of an annual repertory season. The playing area is entirely outdoors, and it’s no wonder that A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a standard annual offering. Ensconced in surprisingly comfortable seats in a beautifully woodsy glen, you truly feel as though you too are in the middle of a vast forest, communing with fairy creatures.

 (My pleasure in this particular performance was enhanced by the fact that a neighbor’s son, Steven Taub Gordon, had risen from the ranks of the understudies to play one of show’s quartet of lovers, the charmingly addled Lysander.)

 Back when talkies were something new and exciting, Hollywood’s big studios went out of their way to launch prestige projects, including elaborate screen versions of Shakespeare’s best-loved plays. MGM, for instance, staged a 1936 production of Romeo and Juliet, starring members of the studio’s prized acting stable: John Barrymore as Mercutio, Basil Rathbone as Tybalt, Edna May Oliver as Juliet’s nurse. The two young lovers were played by long-in-the-tooth Leslie Howard (age 43) and Norma Shearer (the 34-year-old wife of producer Irving Thalberg). It’s a well-spoken production, but also one that’s stiff and unconvincing in its portrayal of youthful passion.

 Up until now I’d never managed to see the Warner Bros. contribution to the Shakespeare derby. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which had been staged as an early silent film back in 1905, was filmed in 1935 by Austrian stage and screen director Max Reinhardt, who had just fled rising anti-Semitism in Europe. Reinhardt adored spectacle, and the film spends much of its length on musical interludes, featuring woodland creatures (fairies, nymphs, trolls) frolicking in the moonlight to the lush strains of Felix Mendelssohn. Today all those supernatural beings, photographed in shimmering black & white, can get a bit tiresome, with the oodles of fairies (all with long silvery tresses and filmy gowns) seeming not far removed from the stylized routines that made Busby Berkeley famous. Still, Victor Jory (wearing what looks like a crown of twisted twigs) makes a stalwart Oberon, and Anita Louise is a lovely Titania.

 Among the mortal lovers, perennial juvenile Dick Powell plays Lysander as a ready-for-anything college boy, in a performance that has always been much scorned, even by Powell himself. Opposite him is the very young Olivia De Havilland, making her screen debut. They and the two additional star-crossed lovers, Ross Alexander and Jean Muir, are pretty silly, in roles that always require a certain amount of silliness.

 Naturally, it’s the most earth-bound characters who come out best, particularly James Cagney as Bottom the Weaver and the wide-mouthed Joe E. Brown as Flute, who must don a dress to play opposite Bottom in the world’s wackiest performance of the tragic “Pyramus and Thisbe.” Young Mickey Rooney’s antic Puck sounds like a good idea: he was a small, energetic fifteen-year-old who was talented and ready for anything. But Rooney’s hyperactive performance should only be sampled in small doses. After seeing it, you’ll be ready for a Midsummer Night’s snooze.