42ND STREET

WARNER BROS., 1933 | BLACK AND WHITE, 89 MINUTES

DIRECTOR: LLOYD BACON SCREENPLAY: RIAN JAMES AND JAMES SEYMOUR, BASED ON THE NOVEL BY BRADFORD ROPES SONGS: HARRY WARREN (MUSIC) AND AL DUBIN (LYRICS) MUSICAL NUMBERS: BUSBY BERKELEY STARRING: WARNER BAXTER (JULIAN MARSH), BEBE DANIELS (DOROTHY BROCK), GEORGE BRENT (PAT DENNING), RUBY KEELER (PEGGY SAWYER), GUY KIBBEE (ABNER DILLON), DICK POWELL (BILLY LAWLER), UNA MERKEL (LORRAINE FLEMING), GINGER ROGERS (ANN “ANYTIME ANNIE” LOWELL), GEORGE E. STONE (ANDY LEE), EDWARD J. NUGENT (TERRY), TOBY WING (“YOUNG AND HEALTHY” GIRL)

An ailing director struggles to put on a Broadway show despite problems with his star.

You’re going out there a youngster… but you’ve got to come back a star!” This is the definitive backstage musical and, with its fierce energy and Busby Berkeley inventiveness, it remains marvelously fresh many decades later.

If musicals were not completely dead in the dimmest days of the Great Depression, sometimes it was hard to tell. What a master stroke, then, on the part of Warner Bros., to bring musicals back with one that reflected the national mood instead of ignoring it. People in 42nd Street are destitute, anxious, or both. Director Julian Marsh needs a hit so badly that he ignores his doctor’s warnings; star Dorothy Brock tries to keep her career going by playing nice with an investor she loathes; chorus girls Lorraine and “Anytime Annie” make wisecracks and sleep around to get jobs; and young Peggy Sawyer is sweet, talented, and starving. Audiences could identify with this kind of desperation, and could then find catharsis when, after Dorothy is injured in a drunken fall, Peggy goes on in her place and triumphs. It didn’t matter that Ruby Keeler’s acting and singing were appealingly amateurish, and that her tap dancing was more emphatic than graceful. She was someone people could believe in, just as they could believe that the success of her show, Pretty Lady, was a harbinger of better times. The musical escapism on view in 42nd Street is far more hard-edged than it is frivolous, and its final shot is not of Peggy’s success but of Marsh standing in an alleyway, exhausted and depleted. In a grim time, song and dance and despair can be a perfect combination.