Metacritic reviews

A great supporting cast and Bacon's well-judged direction help make Footlight Parade one of the greatest of the Berkeley extravaganzas.

Busby Berkeley's finest hour comes in this flabbergasting Warners musical, with James Cagney as a Berkeley-like choreographer who directs, for a string of Broadway theaters, a series of "preview" dance numbers that blow your socks off.

Cagney, the film's best asset, is irrepressible. [07 May 2006, p.34]

One of the best of the Warner Brothers showbiz musicals (1933), with James Cagney turning in a dynamite performance as an enterprising producer, and Busby Berkeley contributing some of his most engaging and bizarre production numbers.

By far the best part of the film is its first hour, fast, furious and funny as Cagney sets out to convince his nervous backers that his idea for live prologues to accompany talkies can be made to work.

It has some silly, yet irresistibly wonderful examples of Busby Berkeley's pinwheel choreography.

Footlight Parade is not as good as 42nd Street and Gold Diggers but the three socko numbers here eclipse some of the preceding Busby Berkeley staging for spectacle.

It is not until Footlight Parade has been struggling through its plot for more than an hour that the fragments of song, costumed nymphs and technical virtuosity are finally integrated in a complete performance.