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When it came out, this was pretty much state of the art musical film entertainment. To this day it's more entertaining than most, in great part because it has James Cagney in the lead role as a musical prologue producer under a succession of deadlines and sheltered from all storms by his trusty "girl Friday" played by Joan Blondell. Also the musical numbers towards the end which were put together by Busby Berkeley are pretty much a knock-out as far as that type of thing goes.
But this is a pretty strange movie. I mean in one of those numbers, you've got Billy Barty running around pretending to be a lovable toddler, doing all kinds of weird stuff. Ruby Keeler seems to have a sickening smile plastered on her face at all times, but at least she's not required to act like in some of her later unfortunate films. You'd never guess that Dick Powell was any kind of tough guy from seeing him in this movie; apparently all the tough guy energy was allocated to the star Cagney. As for Cagney, his high speed rants about musical shows and so forth are endearing and annoying at the same time. After a while it gets a bit too much. You expect him to walk out and say, "Hey! I've got a great idea for a prologue! The women are cigarettes, and they come out of a pack of smokes! Oh no, we did that one last month!" It's funny but it gets a bit repetitive. In the moments where he has to get tough with the bad girl, Ruth Donnelly, some of the established Cagney gangster character comes out. In fact frequent B gangster director William Keighley is credited here with dialogue coaching, and it seems at times that Cagney and Blondell are invoking something very "street" even though the characters aren't criminal.
The musical numbers... what can you say? They stand alone as entertainment, the way that Berkeley uses the human body and geometry is really startling. But none of them really mean anything. It means "Honeymoon Hotel", nothing really more or less. And the whole pretense of the integration falls apart immediately, since the characters in the show are doing things that couldn't possibly be appreciated by a theater audience like the movie portrays. For example at one point they show the fine print on a newspaper, things like that. The whole thing could only exist on film, so the idea that the prologues are actually live shows is ridiculous. I can only suppose that audiences of the time were somewhat less critical about things like this than they would be ten years later or so, because this is a very polished production.
It's great to see Cagney himself show off his superb dancing skills, and he can actually share the stage with a dancer like Keeler. Cagney and Blondell have excellent chemistry and their scenes go off really well. The music I would say is only mediocre, but mostly pleasing if repetitive. Bacon's direction in general is very suitable but never interesting. The film's entertainment value is unquestionable and it has also picked up some nostalgic value along the way. It's a cut above most "let's put on a show" films of the 30s.


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