NEW MUSICAL COMEDY

Star (Christchurch), Volume LXVI, Issue 20330, 13 June 1934, Page 3

NEW MUSICAL COMEDY

“Fcotlight Parade” Starts Saturday.

“ Catherine the Great ’’ will conclude its successful season at the Plaza Theatre on Friday night. “ Footlight Parade,” a film with a definite element of originality, will be the major attraction at the Plaza Theatre on Saturday. James Cagney, Joan Blondell, Ruby Keeler (Mrs A 1 Jolson). Dick Powell, Guy Kibbee and other stage and screen favourites are included in the huge cast. In most musical films the music is absolutely paramount, even though it is not always very good; but in “ Footlight Parade ” there is a definite story—in fact, several stories—containing drama, humour and good acting, while the musical numbers, excellent though they are, are incidental to the plot. Three of the song and dance ensembles are perhaps the best things of their kind ever put on the screen, each different, each with catchy music, and each superlativelv produced. “ Honeymoon Hotel,” “ Shanghai Lil,’’ and “By a Waterfall ” are numbers which will not soon be forgotten by those who see and hear them. The film deals with the work of a great firm making prologues for cinema theatres, and hundreds of persons are seen in action during the unwinding of the enthralling plot, which reaches its climax in the beautiful and novel “ By a Waterfall number. This spectacle shows scores of lovely girls in a giant marble tank; but there is much more in the scene than can be described in a brief paragraph. So filled with detail is the sequence that it really needs to be seen three or four times to be fully appreciated Box plans at the D.I.C.