Introduced by Matthew Kennedy
Matthew Kennedy is the author of Joan Blondell: A Life Between Takes, as well as Marie Dressler: A Biography and Edmund Goulding's Dark Victory.

It's all over the news: silent pictures are finished, and that means curtains for the stage musical. Such is the setup for Footlight Parade, a backstage saga that is “fast-paced, knowing, and arguably the best of the Warner Bros. Depression musicals” (Matthew Kennedy). James Cagney stars as a peripatetic producer inspired by the crisis to create entertainment on an industrial scale. Blondell is his bright-eyed, lovelorn secretary, flashing glances of annoyance and sidelong affection, perhaps most entertaining when she's insulting her rival for Cagney's attentions: “As long as they've got sidewalks, you've got a job!” Spiced with pre-Code jabs at mass morals, the parade of verbal and physical fancy footwork culminates in a trio of wildly elaborate Busby Berkeley numbers-the naughty “Honeymoon Hotel”; “By a Waterfall,” with its hundred cascading chorines; and the weird chinoiserie-cum-military-drill “Shanghai Lil.” Footlight Parade found Blondell working with both current and future husbands: after divorcing cinematographer George Barnes, she would go on to marry costar Dick Powell in 1936.
—Juliet Clark