Lloyd Bacon (1933)

The title number is a great song.  Some of the lyrics by Al Dubin verge on the tongue-twisting; the tune by Harry Warren is celebratory but with a hazardous edge.  The combined effect – of amusing, exciting urgency – epitomises the film.  Because 42nd Street has become the prototype of backstage musicals it has a timeless quality; because it now represents a vanished age of American popular songwriting, theatrical production and movie-making, it has a built-in nostalgic one.   But 42nd Street is also of its time in a specific and dynamic way.  The film was released a few weeks after Franklin D Roosevelt entered the White House; the script (by Rian James and James Seymour, based on a novel by Bradley Ropes) includes references to the Depression; and the rehearsals for ‘Pretty Lady’ – the show within the film – give off an energy that’s exhilarating but which is anxious too, suggesting that those lucky enough to get a place in the chorus line have to keep singing and dancing-till-they-drop to keep the wolf from the door.   No one is more anxious than the show’s director, Julian Marsh (Warner Baxter), a Broadway legend and notorious slave-driver who drives himself hard too.   ‘You ought to be worth a few dollars’, the producers (Robert McWade and Ned Sparks) of ‘Pretty Lady’ tell Marsh.  ‘I ought to be – but I’m not’, he replies:  he lost his money in the 1929 Crash and he’s desperate for a big hit so that he can retire and relax.  His doctor warns the chain-smoking Marsh, who has heart trouble, he’s risking his life taking on another high-pressure assignment – and Warner Baxter, who plays him with apoplectic brio but exudes desperate exhaustion, is alarmingly convincing in the role.   The director Lloyd Bacon ends the film with a moment of startling diminuendo:  after the show’s successful premiere in Philadelphia, Julian Marsh sits on the theatre fire escape, deeply relieved but at the end of his tether.

The star of the show, Dorothy Brock (Bebe Daniels), breaks her ankle on the eve of the premiere; the newcomer Peggy Sawyer replaces her and, just before curtain up, is on the receiving end of an exhortation from Julian Marsh that climaxes with the immortal ‘ … you’re going out a youngster, but you’ve got to come back a star!”  She duly obliges and 42nd Street made a star of Ruby Keeler, who plays Peggy.  Keeler’s success is a triumph of likeableness – even ordinariness:  she’s pretty rather than beautiful with a singing voice that’s no more than pleasant; she’s an evidently conscientious, not to say effortful, dancer; and she’s not much of an actress.  When she arrives at the casting call, Peggy is a comical greenhorn of the theatre; Ruby Keeler forgets this quickly and her characterisation is never very secure.  ‘Pretty Lady’ is being bankrolled by a wealthy lech called Abner Dillon (Guy Kibbee) and Dorothy Brock is his mistress:  when they fall out, the show is on the verge of collapse.  After Dorothy is injured, the angel transfers his affections to another member of the cast ‘Anytime’ Annie Lowell (‘She only ever said no once,’ says the show’s dance director (George E Stone), ‘and that was when she didn’t hear the question’).   Dillon wants Annie to play the lead but she’s honest enough to say that she’s not up to it and that Peggy deserves the chance:  since Annie is played by Ginger Rogers, you need to suspend disbelief when she admits that Ruby Keeler is more talented than she is.  Rogers and Una Merkel, as Annie’s fellow chorine Lorraine, are an enjoyably vivid double act; Dick Powell is warm and funny as the rather hopeless juvenile lead who carries a torch for Peggy; and George Brent has a nice ambiguity as Pat Denning, Dorothy Brock’s old vaudeville partner and the man she still loves, even though she’s left him miles behind professionally.

Although ‘Forty-Second Street’ is heard in snatches throughout and there’s plenty of ‘You’re Getting To Be A Habit With Me’, I was surprised there weren’t more numbers in the film – until, that is, its last fifteen minutes, when the premiere of ‘Pretty Lady’ is underway and you get ‘Shuffle Off To Buffalo’, ‘Young and Healthy’ and the title song in its climactic entirety.   The distinction between ‘Forty-Second Street’ as a stage musical number and a movie musical extravaganza is beguilingly blurred here:  there are New York street bits that can’t possibly be taking place in a Philadelphia theatre (and it’s interesting that Philadelphia is where the film ends – before the Broadway triumph that will follow).  The musical numbers are the work of Busby Berkeley and the kaleidoscopic patterns of his choreography, which uses human bodies as geometric shapes rather than bodies, gradually take over.  I preferred the simpler chorus line sequences – they’re closer to the animating spirit of 42nd Street, a spirit which gives this wonderfully entertaining film its distinctive grit.

13 May 2014