“The last champions of John Ford have now gathered around 7 Women as a beacon of personal cinema” – Andrew Sarris, 1968: Anne Bancroft as Dr. Cartwright in Ford’s last feature, 7 Women, set in 1935 at an American mission in China (1966). (MGM)
An essay excerpted from the new edition of Persistence of Vision: A Collection of Film Criticism, edited by Joseph McBride, 2026. Originally published in 1968 by the Wisconsin Film Society Press, Madison, this rare book ranging from the silent era through the late 1960s virtually disappeared after its limited release and now has been brought back by Sticking Place Books, New York, and is available from Sticking Place. McBride has provided a new introduction placing the book and its contributions by Wisconsin Film Society members at the University of Wisconsin and their friends and mentors (including Andrew Sarris) in the context of the nascent period of film studies in that era and the film society movement that helped bring the field into existence. The new edition also contains many new illustrations, often in color.
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A great part of my work has not been the work of a choreographer strictly speaking, because, for me, if I dare to say it, it is the camera that must dance. – Busby Berkeley
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Busby Berkeley’s prolificacy in the thirties was due largely to his collaboration with other directors; in only a few films did he also direct the story scenes. Usually he had a shoddy framework for his wonderful production numbers. Gold Diggers of 1933, perhaps his most famous film, is burdened with a so-so story only partially enlivened by Mervyn LeRoy’s direction. But Footlight Parade, released later the same year, is different. James Cagney is cast as an obvious Berkeley figure, the director of stage “prologues.” The other characters and the Warners’ backstage plot are satirized; Berkeley appears to have worked in close harmony with Lloyd Bacon in planning the story scenes.
The structure fits the satirical attitude: there is but one production number, and that on a small scale, in the first half of the picture; in the second half there are three, each literally within seconds of the other. The girls in Cagney’s troupe change in their bus as it speeds through town, siren blaring, from theater to theater to theater. The Berkeley trademark of a curtain opening on an impossibly huge “stage” number never fit the story’s tone so well, and hence was never so amusing.
The style of the story falls into several patterns. The money problem, as in the Gold Diggers series, provides the dramatic impetus. The film opens with Cagney learning that talking pictures are forcing small-scale stage shows out of business, and that the only solution is to travel with a large production. “Instead of forty people our musicals will have eighty!” he says in a quintessential Berkeley statement. Cagney (as Chester Kent) is having trouble keeping solvent; he gambles on super-productions, and finally wins. (Berkeley’s musicals were Warners’ gamble which brought that company out of its near-fatal Depression slump.) Cagney/Berkeley bursts comically with ideas; the slightest hint sends him into a tap dance illustrating a doctor-nurse routine, a cat he finds on the street inspires him to a “pussycat-tomcat” number, and even a coffeepot sends him into creative ecstasy: “Say, how about a great big coffeepot . . . the boys come out, the girls come out – and the audience goes out.” Telephones are always ringing, the financiers are always nearby, his wife is divorcing him, a gold digger bilking him and his secretary (Joan Blondell) pursuing him. Berkeley’s self-parody is comparable to Fellini’s in 8 1/2. He even plays a part in the film – as the dance director who says he can’t use Dick Powell.
Powell this time is not a starving songwriter but a sponge in the keep of a Margaret Dumont-like matron. Ruby Keeler begins as a schoolmarmish secretary, but winds up as the star of the show when she has her hair redone. Gone is the tartness of Aline MacMahon, replaced by the idiocy of a mutinous stage manager, an effete censor, and the snobbish, phony gold digger. The show is in extreme confusion, the dancers always rehearsing, Cagney always trotting around the building as only Cagney could trot. The soft-shoe routines he does during rehearsal and in the “Shanghai Lil” number take humorous advantage of his peculiarly stiffened shoulders and back.
Ruby Keeler and Dick Powell
The odd amalgam of stage and screen common to the early thirties and exploited in the hard-boiled films of Howard Hawks, Raoul Walshm and Michael Curtiz is here at its most taut: cuts always seem to come on lines of dialogue, ringing telephones, opening doors, or people walking into the frame. The camera follows the characters around the room – they always walk fast – and the talk seems to consist largely of commands. Lewis Milestone was one of the first American directors to grasp this method of turning dialogue into action, in his 1931 The Front Page; he hit on the simple device of having the characters talk as rapidly as possible. In Walsh’s The Roaring Twenties (1939), much of the excitement comes from the way the camera moves around with Bogart and Cagney as they talk. Hawks and, later, Orson Welles further developed styles of overlapping dialogue.
Footlight Parade abounds in wipes, up, down, sideways and of the windshield-wiper variety; the wipe, oddly enough, has much the same effect as a rapidly opening door. The wipe underscores the rapidity of the film’s constant shifting from rehearsal scenes (there’s always a chorus line going) to confrontations in the halls and offices. The wisecracking, insulting dialogue common to the gangster genre and here at its fastest pace was turned to great advantage in the verbal slapstick of the Marx Brothers and Preston Sturges. This style added immensely to the flavor of the gangster and backstage films, which by nature had to spend much of their time indoors. A gangster movie with slow, deliberately delivered lines and slow camera movements (The Public Enemy) seems almost to betray the style of its genre. “My camera moved all the time,” Berkeley said recently. “For me that’s the meaning of the expression ‘motion picture.’ It’s images in movement.” Berkeley liberated the moving camera from its basis of dialogue and counterpointed his images with music and singing, developing with Clair, Hitchcock, Renoir, Mamoulian, and Vidor (and others) the authentic uses of sound film. He learned early that “the camera is the only spectator” and created strangely beautiful fantasies. Berkeley is a man of pure spectacle, or, if you will, abstraction.
“Sittin’ on a Backyard Fence”
Placing the short “Sittin’ on a Backyard Fence” number early in the film whets the audience’s taste for the larger numbers that bring the film to a close. “Backyard Fence,” done on a small set with a small number of girls, is necessary for balance: with all the numbers at the end, the film would seem like two pictures spliced together. The expressionism of this number (slanted Caligari-like buildings, giant milk bottles, cat costumes, a painted Moon) foreshadows the unrestrained fantasy of the later numbers. Another Berkeley/Bacon device prepares the audience for the last half hour: story scenes are played under music to be used later in the production numbers. Cagney plays “Shanghai Lil” at the piano while trying to think of ideas for the show, and the same music is played by the strings when he puts his arm around Joan Blondell. “Honeymoon Hotel” plays under Blondell’s return to her apartment – but when the snobbish Miss Rich enters, the music shifts to the melancholic “Shanghai Lil.” Powell teasing Keeler is accompanied ironically with “By a Waterfall,” and Blondell is wearing a “Shanghai Lil” sailor suit when Cagney reels in drunk with Miss Rich. This imaginative structural device helps greatly in uniting story with spectacle.
The three big production numbers take place at the Jupiter, Mercury, and Diana Theaters – Cagney says, “Looks like we’re in the laps of the Greek gods [actually, those are the Roman names for the Greek gods and goddess Zeus, Hermes, and Artemis]” – a humorous tribute by Berkeley to the classical influences on his style, most clearly seen in the “Waterfall” number, shifting geometric images of swimming wood nymphs. John Thomas, in an excellent 1967 article on Berkeley,1 points out that Jung considered the whorl pattern, or mandala, the basic integrating image within the human psyche. Thomas argues that Berkeley’s variations on this pattern account for much of the appeal of his style, reflecting “an age so disorganized that mechanization could be seen as a desirable goal,” and at the same time set his limitations. Berkeley shows in the first big number, “Honeymoon Hotel,” that his style was based just as much on straight-line patterns, the style, in fact, of the tracking shot. “By a Waterfall,” the most lavish of all his numbers and the one he found the most difficult to create, mixes whorls with shifting patterns of straight lines (one of the most characteristic is that of a row of girls appearing one by one in front of the camera, here static but in Gold Diggers of 1933 moving). The final number, “Shanghai Lil,” is again largely diagonal, starting with a long trucking shot of Cagney and climaxing with crane shots of marching soldiers, another image germane to Berkeley’s style. “Honeymoon Hotel” emphasizes faces and is, naturally, more intimate than the other two in its odd comic-strip way; “Waterfall” is dreamlike abstraction of movement; “Shanghai Lil” begins slowly with faces speaking and singing in succession and builds to a rousing martial climax louder and more dynamic than anything in the previous two numbers.
“By a Waterfall.” Still, editor’s collection
After the long trucking shot along the street with Powell and Keeler’s feet as they approach the Honeymoon Hotel and start to sing, the scene changes to a series of panning close-ups of the hotel workers singing rather scabrously about their duties, from the leering doorman to the boy who brings the “cider” to the house dicks who wonder why everyone’s name is Smith. The fast rhythm of the music makes the syncopated walking of the couple and the maid seem almost balletic, as are the motion of the pairs of husbands marching into the washrooms and the long lines of hands pulling them into the boudoirs – and the hands hanging out “Do Not Disturb” signs. Berkeley has marvelous fun with the symmetry of the hall, climaxing the pattern with a shot of the entire set (two floors) seen in cutaway. The number ends directly with a pan from Powell and Keeler in bed to a magazine next to the window blowing open to a picture of a baby. This is the funniest of the numbers and the quickest, a sort of teaser for the more lyrical ones to follow.
“If this doesn’t get ’em, nothing will,” Cagney whispers at the start of “By a Waterfall.“ Berkeley recalls, “The day I had the idea, I let Jack Warner know about it and he told me I would ruin even the Bank of America.” This incredible number, one of the most ambitious in the history of the musical, is clearly intended as a sexual dream. Powell falls asleep in the woods and Ruby Keeler runs off to cavort with nymphs sliding down an Edenic waterfall. After a shot of water streaming against the back of Keeler’s head, enveloping her in a halo not unlike the tiaras of Grecian statues, Berkeley poises a girl on a rock – and only when she dives and shatters the surface do we realize that the camera is underwater, a hallucinatory effect drawing us into the dream. Lines of girls swim back and forth horizontally, then a long triangular train of girls paddles majestically toward the camera from the top of the frame. Another classical shot, worthy of Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia2 (another hymn to the human form in motion), focuses on two long lines of girls lying on their backs in the water; a diver in the extreme foreground raises her arms vertically, the lines meet in the background to match the pattern of her arms, and she dives into their midst, swimming through the breaking and re-forming lines. More underwater shots, then a cut to a whorl shot; the camera tracks back to reveal a girl poised in the foreground ready to dive, then further back to show the setting – a huge water palace geometrically constructed and lined on all sides with diving girls.
“By a Waterfall”
Berkeley cuts to overhead patterns as the girls dive and the whorl contracts and expands into floral patterns of dazzling precision, the lights in the tank changing from eerie shadows to bright lights, a breathtaking use of tonal montage. Closer shots, underwater shots, then patterns of lines shifting diagonally in an amplification of the earlier pattern. Several formations of straight and curved lines, then a cut to girls revolving around a giant fountain. Berkeley cuts from a medium shot to a long shot to a close-up of the girls, then to another close-up from the opposite side: then on to extreme long shot with the fountain reflected in the water of the foreground; a full shot of the fountain, then a high shot as the girls start to kick their legs in several patterns – swinging, jackknife, and so on. All through this sequence choral singing has been mixed in with pure musical accompaniment; no vocal close-ups as in “Honeymoon Hotel,” but rather an abstraction of the beauty of Woman. Harmonious motion seen from a distance and the group movements and singing create a rarified contrast to the brash sexuality of the previous number. A small coda scene of Keeler tossing water to awaken Powell, the camera craning up to a nest of birds, gracefully ends this most remarkable sequence.
After this, “Shanghai Lil” would be an anticlimax were it not for the melodramatic power of Cagney taking over the lead singing role when his male star for the number is revealed as a phony planted by a rival. The story rescues the pacing – the final benefit of the integration of story and music. Cagney pushes the singer onto the stairs to the set, but tumbles down the stairs himself; the scene begins, as in “Honeymoon Hotel,” with a long trucking shot along with his feet; this recreates the suspense dissipated by the previous number, since the audience does not know which of the men is going to carry through with the song. As the camera moves past people at their tables, each one half-speaks, half-sings a line about the mysterious “Shanghai Lil”; after a static scene of Cagney singing at a table, the pace gradually increases as a long trucking shot moves past the faces of people at a bar, singing a line each about Shanghai Lil. A series of Sternbergian shots of a brothel, crisscrossed by slats and bars, follows as Cagney searches for Lil. Sailors enter and fight Cagney, the scene choreographed like a musical number. Then the last slight pause in the rhythm: Cagney finds Lil (Ruby Keeler) and they start, slowly, to tap-dance.
Busby Berkeley, 1930s portrait. Editor’s collection
From then on the scene becomes increasingly dynamic. A bugle calls the sailors to their ship, the camera craning up the stairs left as the sailors march down right and finally halting at the very base of the floor as the men march around it. The sailors march in patterns, anticipating the style of Triumph of the Will; pans of marching men are intercut with extreme close-ups of faces shouting orders. Chinese girls join the marchers, and the whole group forms overhead patterns of that great trio, the American flag, President Roosevelt, and the Blue Eagle. Lil joins Cagney disguised as a sailor. A long crane movement sweeps along with the marching men, gaining on them and forming its own abstract pattern of movement. Berkeley tracks in on Cagney flipping a pack of cards for Lil, showing her the ship to America sailing in animation. After a shot of the two marching off to join the rest, the number ends. With backstage scenes of Chester Kent’s triumph the movie ends.
With a single-mindedness and individuality rare in the history of the movies (he speaks of his effort to make “something new, something surprising, something never seen before”), Busby Berkeley created an inimitable body of work. Today everything is against him; he is “camp.” Audiences feel constrained in enjoying his films wholeheartedly. This is a shame, of course, but some people don’t want to be entertained. And if this doesn’t get ’em, nothing will.
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Images are screenshots from YouTube trailers and clips unless otherwise indicated.
- John Thomas, “The Machineries of Joy,” Film Society Review, February 1967. [↩]
- German director Leni Riefenstahl, who began as a dancer and made the Nazi propaganda films Triumph of the Will and Olympia, “was told of the comparison of Berkeley’s regimented ensembles to the thousands of soldiers she had filmed in uncanny similarity [in Triumph of the Will]. She didn’t disagree, saying she had learned much from the early Warner Brothers musicals and that she was an admirer of Busby Berkeley.” – Jeffrey Spivak, Buzz: The Life and Art of Busby Berkeley, University Press of Kentucky, Lexington, 2011. [↩]
