Paramount on Parade

Paramount on Parade
Directed by	Edmund Goulding and 10 other directors
Produced by	Jesse L. Lasky Adolph Zukor Albert S. Kaufman
Written by	Joseph L. Mankiewicz
Starring	Jean Arthur Richard Arlen Clara Bow Evelyn Brent Nancy Carroll Maurice Chevalier Kay Francis Jack Oakie Lillian Roth
Music by	Harold Jackson Richard A. Whiting Elsie Janis
Cinematography	Victor Milner Harry Fischbeck
Distributed by	Paramount Pictures
Release date(s)	22 April 1930
Running time	102 minutes
Country	United States
Language	English

Paramount on Parade (1930) is an all-star revue released by Paramount Pictures, directed by several directors including Edmund Goulding, Dorothy Arzner, Ernst Lubitsch, Rowland V. Lee, A. Edward Sutherland, Victor Heerman, Lothar Mendes, Otto Brower, Edwin H. Knopf, Frank Tuttle, and Victor Schertzinger -- all supervised by the production supervisor, singer, actress, and songwriter Elsie Janis. Featured stars included Jean Arthur, Richard Arlen, Clara Bow, Evelyn Brent, Buddy Rogers, Maurice Chevalier, Nancy Carroll, George Bancroft, Kay Francis, Richard "Skeets" Gallagher, Gary Cooper, Fay Wray, Lillian Roth and many other Paramount stars. The screenplay was written by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, produced by Adolph Zukor and Jesse L. Lasky, with cinematography by Victor Milner and Harry Fischbeck.

Paramount on Parade, released on April 22, 1930, was Paramount's answer to all-star revues like Hollywood Revue of 1929 from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, The Show of Shows from Warner Brothers, and King of Jazz from Universal Studios.^[1][2] The film had 20 individual segments—several of them in two-strip Technicolor — directed by 11 directors, and almost every star on the Paramount roster except Claudette Colbert and the Marx Brothers. Internet Movie Database says the Jeanette MacDonald segment — showing her and Metropolitan Opera tenor Nino Martini just before he sings "Come Back to Sorrento" — was cut from the release print, but may still exist in Galas de la Paramount, the Spanish-language version of the film. Paramount also produced a French-language version Paramount en Parade directed by Charles de Rochefort and a Romanian-language version Parada Paramount (see IMDB links below). Chevalier and Martini also starred in the French version, and Romanian actress Pola Illéry starred in the Romanian version.

The film, including its Technicolor sequences, has been restored by the UCLA Film and Television Archive. Unfortunately, the sound for some of the Technicolor sequences is still missing. According to Robert Gitt, film archivist now retired from UCLA, in a lecture at Pacific Film Archive at UC Berkeley, the film was also released with sound-on-disc for those theaters not equipped for sound-on-film. The archive had a report of the soundtrack for this film still existing on disc until the 1994 Northridge earthquake destroyed a set of discs that a collector was planning to donate.

List of Sequences

• "Showgirls on Parade" with Mitzi Mayfair (Technicolor)
• "Title Sequence"
• "Introduction" Jack Oakie, Richard "Skeets" Gallagher, and Leon Errol introduce themselves as MC's
• "Love Time" Buddy Rogers and Lillian Roth
• "Murder Will Out" William Powell, Clive Brook, Warner Oland, Eugene Pallette, and Oakie
• "Origin of the Apache" Maurice Chevalier and Evelyn Brent do a parody of an Apache dance
• "Song of the Gondolier" Nino Martini sings "Come Back to Sorrento" (Technicolor)
• "In a Hospital" Errol, Helen Kane, and David Newell
• "In a Girl's Gym" Jack Oakie and Zelma O'Neal
• "The Toreador" Kay Francis and Harry Green (as Isadore the Toreador)
• "The Montmartre Girl" Ruth Chatterton, Stu Erwin, and Fredric March
• "Park in Paris" Maurice Chevalier
• "Mitzi Herself" Mitzi Green
• "The Schoolroom" Helen Kane
• "The Gallows Song" Skeets Gallagher and Dennis King (Technicolor)
• "Dance Mad" Nancy Carroll and Abe Lyman's Band
• "Dream Girl" Richard Arlen, Jean Arthur, Mary Brian, Gary Cooper, and Fay Wray
• "The Redhead" Clara Bow, Oakie, and 42 Navy men sing "True to the Navy"
• "Impulses" George Bancroft, Francis, and Cecil Cunningham
• "Rainbow Revels" finale (in Technicolor) Chevalier and girls' chorus (including Iris Adrian and Virginia Bruce) sing "Sweeping the Clouds Away"

References

External links

• Paramount on Parade at IMDB
• Paramount en Parade (French language version) at IMDB
• Galas de la Paramount (Spanish language version) at IMDB
• Parada Paramount (Romanian language version) at IMDB
• Paramount op Parade (Dutch language version) at Film Database
• Paramount op Parade at IMDB
• Paramount on Parade at TCM Movie Database
• Paramount on Parade clips at Google Video
• Paramount on Parade at Silver Screen Archive
• Paramount on Parade at Vitaphone Varieties
• Paramount on Parade at Clara Bow Filmography
• Paramount on Parade at Fredric March Filmography