NFR Project: Backstage drama in '42nd Street' (1933)

 

NFR Project: ‘42^nd Street’

Dir: Lloyd Bacon

Scr: Rian James, James Seymour, Whitney Bolton

Pho: Sol Polito

Ed: Thomas Pratt, Frank Ware

Premiere: March 11, 1933

89 min.

 

 “I don’t want to go to Philadelphia!”

“Who does?”

 

This is the grandaddy of movie musicals, so full of cliches you don’t realize that this was the film that invented them. (It's been spoofed on stage in Dames at Sea, and in film in Stanley Donen's Movie Movie.)

Nobody loves a show-biz story more than Hollywood, and this adaptation of a 1932 novel by Bradford Ropes gives us a backstage look at the trials and triumphs of those plucky hoofers and singers who come out of nowhere to make it big on Broadway.

We are given several characters to root for. The show’s director, Julian Marsh (Warner Baxter) is dangerously ill, and broke. He needs one more hit to retire on. Thus the mounting of the production of the new Broadway musical Pretty Lady. He’s a demanding, despairing, chain-smoking maniac, but evidently he’s a genius at this sort of thing, so he is given his own head.

To the show comes the wide-eyed rookie, Peggy Sawyer (Ruby Keeler), who gets a chance thanks to the machinations of a couple of wisecracking chorus girls played by Una Merkel and a very young Ginger Rogers. Soon she is time-stepping and falling in love along with the juvenile lead, played by Dick Powell, then at the beginning of his career.

Then – the day of the opening – the leading lady breaks her ankle! What are they going to do? Simple, says the juvenile lead. Put Peggy Sawyer in the lead role. Do it! The director smokes some more. Then he acquiesces. For hours, March and Peggy train. Finally, it is time for the curtain. The director grabs her and gives her the classic speech:

“Sawyer, you listen to me, and you listen hard. Two hundred people, two hundred jobs, two hundred thousand dollars, five weeks of grind and blood and sweat depend upon you. It's the lives of all these people who've worked with you. You've got to go on, and you've got to give and give and give. They've got to like you. Got to. Do you understand? You can't fall down. You can't because your future's in it, my future and everything all of us have is staked on you. All right, now I'm through, but you keep your feet on the ground and your head on those shoulders of yours and go out, and Sawyer, you're going out a youngster but you've got to come back a star!”

No pressure. 

And what a triumph Peggy is! Everyone loves her. In fact, after the show, the audience credits her and not Marsh with the show’s success. To which Marsh merely tosses disconsolately his cigarette butt.

The most important innovation took place in the staging of the musical numbers. The songs – lyrics by Al Dubin and music by Harry Warren – are top-notch, and include the title number, “Shuffle Off to Buffalo,” and “Young and Healthy.” What’s unique is that, as soon as the musical numbers take flight, the camera moves freely through, around, and over the performers – all thanks to the genius of choreographer Busby Berkeley.

Dollies through sets of legs. Overhead shots of flashing limbs, shifting and curling into geometric patterns. The stage space evaporates, and we move fully into a filmic space, where only things that can be done with a camera can happen. Inventive cinematography takes over. It must have been like a roller-coaster ride for audiences of the day.

At the end, the show’s a smash, the lovers are united. Who could ask for anything more?

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: Baby Face.