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Great news for fans of old musicals! James Cagney in Footlight Parade (1932) is now available on Blu-ray from Warner Archives

Footlight Parade is sheer cinematic joy. In this Depression-era romp, a timid stenographer (Ruby Keeler) removes her glasses and – wow! – she’s a star. A gee-whiz tenor (Dick Powell) asserts his independence. Plucky chorines tap, greedy hangers-on get their comeuppances, and an indefatigable producer/dancer (James Cagney) and his Girl Friday (Joan Blondell) work showbiz miracles to stage live prologues for talkie houses to keep their company afloat during hard times. Honeymoon Hotel, By a Waterfall and Shanghai Lil are the shows, directed by Busby Berkeley and filled with imagination-bending sets, startling camera angles, kaleidoscopic pageantry and a 20,000-gallon-per-minute waterfall. Curtain up!

James Cagney demonstrates his Big Apple hoofer bonafides while adding his one-of-a-kind fiery grit to this Busby Berkeley musical packed with the usual sensational suspects. Chester Kent (Cagney...

Wow … pre-Code pictures frequently offended conservative values, but this saucy ‘n’ sinful big business exposé is guaranteed to bring #MeToo advocates to their feet, demanding that the negative be burned. Loretta Young stars as a rather inconsistent modern maid, trapped between three less-than-scrupulous men. No, make that three total pigs.

She Had to Say Yes

DVD

The Warner Archive Collection

1933 / B&W / 1:37 flat Academy / 66 min. / Street Date October 17, 2017 / available through the WBshop / 21.99

Starring: Loretta Young, Winnie Lightner, Lyle Talbot, Regis Toomey, Hugh Herbert, Ferdinand Gottschalk, Suzanne Kilborn, Helen Ware, Harold Waldridge, George Chandler, Barbara Rogers, Renee Whitney, Pat Wing, Toby Wing.

Cinematography: Arthur Todd

Film Editor: George Amy

Costumes: Orry-Kelly

Written by Rian James, Don Mullaly, from a story by John Francis Larkin

Supervised by Henry Blanke

Directed by Busby Berkeley, George Amy

Loretta Young rules the pre-Code roost! There are plenty of good reasons to amble over to the website Greenbriar Picture Shows,...

To the extent that motion pictures have always glutted us with visions of loveliness, Bebe Daniels was kind of ordinary. I’m not referring of course to her early years, when Daniels ranked with Gloria Swanson and Pola Negri as exalted commodities at Paramount. That was an altogether different incarnation, her silent screen persona based in large measure on “exotic” beauty—milky skin handed down from a Scottish father and a head of raven hair from a Spanish mother.

Daniels had a little age on her when I caught my first happy glimpse.

Well, "age"—a mere 29 in 1930's Alias French Gertie, by which time Hollywood’s corner on the beauty market had already begun mercilessly snapping at her heels. Those immense dark eyes of hers, a lively part of the overall equipment, could still flash. Only now they were being called upon to communicate “Every time I get a...