![]() ![]() In the early 1950s, the era of " An American in Paris" and " Singin' in the Rain," he was still doing the same old tricks in movies like "Million Dollar Mermaid." You know, line up the girls and have them all turn and smile at the same time. ![]() Other American directors of the same period were moving in more imaginative directions Fred Astaire’s "Harlem Bojangles" number in " Swing Time" (1936) was a brilliant demonstration by George Stevens that humor and timing were more entertaining than sheer excess.īerkeley never did get over the geometry, unfortunately. His scenes were more often feats of engineering than creativity. His choreography remained geometric and sterile. ![]() The result of 180 minutes of Berkeley, however, was the impression that he didn’t improve and develop his original insight. James Cagney Chester Kent Joan Blondell Nan Prescott Ruby Keeler Bea Thorn Dick Powell Scotty Blair Guy Kibbee Silas Gould Ruth Donnelly Harriet Bowers. He was, in a sense, testing just how far the movie musical could be pushed before it reached a point of no return. Ruby Keeler, (born August 25, 1909, Halifax, Novia Scotia, Canadadied February 28, 1993, Rancho Mirage, California, U.S. Berkeley delivered magnificently.Īnd at the beginning of his career he was a pioneer and an innovator, because such extravagance had never been imagined before. His audiences expected a Berkeley movie to have infinite parades of smiling girls, lots of expensive effects, trick camera shots, spectacular patterns on the screen, close-ups, of Dick and Ruby ever falling in love anew. He had a proven formula and a reliable audience, and he entertained. If you’ve seen one group of dancing girls making geometric patterns for an overhead camera, you’ve seen them all (and Saturday night, toward the end, I had the feeling that I literally had.)īerkeley, however, wasn’t making his movies for us. Tastes have changed in the intervening decades, and audiences are no longer entertained simply by scope and excess. Hollywood will never again stage scenes on this scale, if only because wages and production costs prohibit.īut there is probably another reason why those mermaids will never swim again. Many of his numbers are stunning in the scope and cost of their production (reportedly more than $10,000 a minute). You respect the discipline needed to mold 100 beautiful blonds into a dance line of machine-like precision. You’ve got to admire the sheer technical skill necessary to choreograph 100 dancing grand pianos. Footlight Parade ( 1933) 102 mins Musical comedy 21 October 1933 Cast: James Cagney, Joan Blondell, Ruby Keeler More Director: Lloyd Bacon Writers: Manuel Seff, James Seymour Cinematographer: George Barnes Editor: George Amy Production Designers: Anton Grot, Jack Okey Production Company: Warner Bros. And that probably wasn’t such a good idea.īerkeley has long had a reputation as the creative genius and master mechanic of the 1930s musical. The audience was shown some two dozen Berkeley production numbers, strung end to end for three hours. ![]()
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