CAST OF FOOTLIGHT PARADE 1933 SERIES

CAST OF FOOTLIGHT PARADE 1933 SERIES

Step for step, his vocabulary rarely deviates from a series of rudimentary leg kicks, shuffles and taps and a few simple, decorative movements of the arms. During that decade, Berkeley had a major rival in Fred Astaire, who was working for RKO, and even a basic comparison of the two men’s choreography reveals the limits of Berkeley’s style. In Gold Diggers of 1933 and Dames, Berkeley elaborated his dance numbers with an ever more inventive panoply of costumes, props and multi-level platforms.īerkeley helped make the 1930s a golden age for the Hollywood musical and the above compilation of clips illustrates just how brilliantly his imagination was suited to the silver screen. The By a Waterfall number in Footlight Parade (1933) featured giant water tanks in which its chorus could float though a riot of pin-wheeling, molecular patterns. He choreographed six more musicals during the next two years and his ideas grew exponentially – and expensively – more flamboyant. The box-office success of 42nd Street propelled Berkeley to the top of his profession.

But as these individuals are re-absorbed into the ensemble, and as the crowd then morphs into a street of dancing buildings, the camera soars higher and higher, until the scene is abstracted into a dreaming cityscape. Berkeley starts out by choreographing vivid vignettes of individual characters: a juggling street vendor, a fighting couple, a drunk, a barber, a cocktail waiter. Even more radical were the visual possibilities created by his agile camera, which ranged from this tracking closeup of the dancers’ legs (1.23), abstracting them to a V-shaped tunnel of stockinged flesh, to the dizzying overhead shots that turned the chorus line into a kaleidoscope of art deco patterns.īerkeley’s overhead shot became his signature device (it was significant perhaps that he’d been an aerial observer with the US air corps) and he made even more dramatic use of it during the second half of the movie’s title number, which dramatised the “naughty, gawdy, bawdy, sporty” life of 42nd Street. He could move his dancers between different levels, without the need for complex lifts or partnerwork (0.24) he could create effective shifts in pattern and speed with only minimal physical activity (0.40). When we look at a number such as Young and Healthy today, its structural devices may seem tame but at the time they embodied a bold new attempt to liberate dance from the physical conventions of the stage, and place it in a purely cinematic dimension.īy constructing the choreography around a trio of hydraulically operated platforms, Berkeley transformed the spatial possibilities of his choreography. 42nd Street gave him the budget and freedom to let those ideas fly. But Berkeley had displayed some talent for working with chorus lines on Broadway, and spent two years with the Samuel Goldwyn studio, choreographing a number of low-budget musicals.ĭuring that period he’d begun playing with new ways to put dance on screen. Warner Brothers were taking something of a punt on Berkeley, who had no formal dance training and whose first experience of choreography had been organising marching drills during the first world war.

42nd Street proved more popular than the Warner Brothers studio bosses had dared imagine but credit was given less to director Lloyd Bacon than to Busby Berkeley, the actor and self-trained choreographer in charge of its musical numbers.

Cast of footlight parade 1933