‘…millionaire versions of a schoolboy’s erotic dream, filled to bursting point with multiple images of a kind that only dreams, movie magic, and the mind of a Berkeley can provide…the train which divides in ‘Shuffle off to Buffalo’ is an eye-popping example of big studio expertise… again the lyrics are on the sexy side.’

…in fact the whole film is on the sexy side!  Although released a year before the Hays Code came into effect, its frank attitudes to relationships and sexual politics are surprising even now, and its jaunty title number depicts begging, prostitution and domestic violence.

Although not mentioned explicitly, Halliwell probably saw this marvellous backstage musical at the Queen’s Theatre in Bolton.

‘The Queen’s in the early 1930s must have had prior claim to all films from the Warner Brothers.  We seemed to experience dozens of their brash and lively Broadway-set musicals, with those dazzling Busby Berkeley numbers shot from overhead so that the lines of chorus girls turned into gyrating kaleidoscopic patterns.’

Directed by Lloyd Bacon, this fast-talking comedy-drama about the trials and tribulations of putting on a Broadway show has no singing in character but ends in a spectacular musical sequence, with routines devised by Broadway choreographer Busby Berkeley and described by LH as –