Just finished watching one of my all time top favorite movies, FOOTLIGHT PARADE. It's been a long time, years and years, since I last saw it, and both its flaws and its strengths knocked me out. In the flaw department, the casual racism ("I'se de captain of de comfort station/At de Honeymoon Hotel") and sexism ("That's the trouble with you -- you're all business! Look at that notepad, and those glasses! Why, there's nothing feminine about you!") are unpleasant reminders of its 1933 context. But that context also comes back in the film's energy and its bright conviction that hard work, dedication, cleverness and luck can overcome any obstacles. Movie audiences in the middle of the Depression needed that message, to be sure; but I think I love this film because it seems to actually believe what it's preaching. All the actors, galvanized by a high-powered and genuinely sexy song-and-dance performance by Jimmy Cagney as a theater choreographer, look to be both working hard, and enjoying themselves. For a musical, the structure is odd: bits and pieces of numbers, nothing complete, until the end, when suddenly three huge song-and-dance extravaganzas burst onto the screen one after another. The final one, "Shanghai Lil," is astounding for its romantic view of waterfront dives in foreign ports, but in its way it's no sillier than CASABLANCA, another film I love. I suppose I should decry the kind of naive gung-ho sentimentality pushed by movies like these, because that attitude is what got us into this nuclear-proliferating, cops-of-the-world, global-warming mess. But to the extent that it's no longer possible for me to see the world through the rosy, let's-roll-up-our-sleeves-and-get-at-it lens these films used, I find them all the more affecting.