Sherry Chandler » Shanghai Lil
Shanghai Lil
In spite of Yankee Doodle Dandy, I find it hard to think of James Cagney as a song and dance man. Yet Wikipedia tells me he started out as a chorus boy in vaudeville and on Broadway and was once a street dancer known as Cellar Door Cagney.
This longish number here is from Footlight Parade, one of three musical extravaganzas Warner Brothers produced in 1933 with huge Buzby Berkeley production numbers. The other two were Gold Diggers of 1933 and 42nd Street.
These were not actually pre-code films — Footlight Parade even makes reference to the code by having a censor in place but he, like the code, was abused and ignored as they proceed to put on numbers like “Honeymoon Hotel,” which seems to have more in common with a notell motel than the bridal suite at the Ritz and “Shanghai Lil” with it’s professional women in opium dens.
Kicking the gong around.
Footlight Parade gets good reviews and some even think it is the best of the three Warner Brother musicals. I didn’t like it much.
Even the huge synchronized swimming number, “By A Waterfall,” was remarkable without being particularly interesting. It consumed an entire reel, as did “Shanghai Lil.”
I’d heap rather watch Ginger Rogers doing “We’re in the Money.” In Pig Latin or not, I wish the long-lost dollar would make another comeback. And come to think of it, that might be part of my problem with Footlight Parade. Too many love songs.
To my somewhat modern eye, the frame story was sexist, racist, and clichéd. I mean, Ruby Keeler as a Chinese courtesan speak/singing pidgen?
What was worse, James Cagney seems to inhabit an entirely different universe from that of Dick Powell, Ruby Keeler, and Guy Kibbee. Joan Blondel could match him for edge but the others belonged in a gentler world.
But the movie has one delightful minute, in the middle of the long number above, when Cagney and Keeler break into a tap routine on the Shanghai bar. Keeler even mimics Cagney’s distinctive marionette-on-a-string tap style for just an instant.
(That style also showed up in about ten seconds worth of “direction” for a sort of pre-Cats number called “Sitting on a Backyard Fence,” but it was only a tease. All was to be saved for the finale, “Shanghai Lil.”)
Alas, the whole number breaks down in the end to a sort of patriotic drill team routine, and how we got from AWOL sailors in Shanghai to FDR’s image on the American flag is a little puzzling. The Warner Brothers did love FDR, but this routine doesn’t have either the emotional power of The Gold Diggers‘ “Remember my Forgotten Man” or the Wow! of 42nd Street’s skyscrapers.
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