The Smell of the Crowd, the Roar of the Greasepaint
Written: Aug 24 '01
Product Rating:
Pros: Fast-paced, well-acted, and gosh if it doesn't make you wanna be a star!
Cons: Dialogue is dated and corny
The Bottom Line: The grandaddy of backstage musicals, this is full of equal parts grit and glamour. Recommended viewing for all NY/LA busboy-wannabe-actors.
Thanks to Busby Berkeley, there are now thousands upon thousands of actors out there waiting for their big break. You see them working odd jobs—waitresses, singing telegram artists, vice-assistant in charge of watering Michael Eisner’s plants, etc.—and you can’t help but feel sorry for their hopeful, starry-eyed souls.
Blame it on Mr. Berkeley.
In the 1933 movie, 42nd Street, the choreographer (and future director) turned dancing into something that borders on a wet dream for ingénues, chorus-kickers and other theatrical wannabes. In the grand finale number, the floorboards are groaning under the weight of all those dancers, fancied up and shimmering in those sugar-spun outfits. The camera swoops above for those aerial shots that turn humans into kaleidoscope crystals; then it plunges into cascading rows of pretty girls, parting like branches in a thick forest; and, finally, orgasmically, the camera tunnels through the solid line of perfectly-shaped gams. It is pure hokum and completely ignores the reality of the dispiriting life of an actor (the auditions, the callbacks, the rejections). Simply by doing a brush-spank with your tap-happy feet, Mr. Berkeley said, it was possible to shuffle off not only to Buffalo, but to Hollywood itself. It’s enough to make an understudy’s heart do its own pitter-pat, tap-tap.
Berkeley would go on to direct and choreograph many great standards of early musical cinema (including the Gold Diggers films of 1933, ’35, ’37 and ’38 and the Judy Garland-Mickey Rooney confections Babes in Arms, Strike Up the Band and Babes on Broadway), but in the Bible of Hollywood musicals, this is the Book of Genesis. [Note: Even though it feels like it, this was not directed by Berkeley. Lloyd Bacon takes the helm here.]
42nd Street is the film which popularized the myth that if you just wait in the wings long enough, sooner or later the star will sprain her ankle and you’ll be able grab her spotlight for a night or two.
“You're going out there a youngster, but you've got to come back a star!”
That’s Julian Marsh (Warner Baxter) speaking. He’s a Broadway director who’s one sweat drop away from a nervous breakdown. He’s putting on a really big show and his leading lady, Dorothy Brock (Bebe Daniels), has just twisted her ankle…five hours before the curtain is due to rise. And so, Marsh grabs starry-eyed ingénue Peggy Sawyer (Ruby Keeler) by the shoulders and tells her to go on, go out there and give it all you got. You’re gonna be a star, baby!
For all its glossy Berkeley dance numbers, 42nd Street is actually a gritty film and, for its day, risqué. Consider the following exchange between Dorothy and Abner Dillon (Guy Kibbee), the sugar daddy who backs the production of Pretty Lady (as long as Dorothy stars in it):
Abner:Well Dorothy, I'd like to do something for you. Dorothy:You've done entirely too much for me already. And I just can't tell you how much I appreciate it. Abner:No, no, no, I mean, uh, I mean, I'd like to do something for you—if you'd do something for me. Dorothy:Why Mr. Dillon, of course I'd be very glad to. But what could I possibly do for a big man like you? Abner: [licking his lips and grinning] Call me Abner? …Fade out…
Of course, they have sex off-camera and if this were 42nd Street 2001, we’d probably witness that encounter. In 1933, however, we only need the hubba-hubba suggestion. There’s also the part where a chorus girl sits on a man’s lap and says something about a “flagpole.” Eyebrow-raising, indeed!
The movie also doesn’t air-brush Julian Marsh’s manic depression (a “nervous breakdown” back then). His chain-smoking, pacing, fretting energy is what drives the cast of Pretty Lady to equal parts exhaustion and inspiration. The camera doesn’t shy away from documenting Marsh’s whip-cracking, berating attitude and the realism can be surprising even today. “These are going to be the toughest five weeks you’ve ever lived through,” he growls as he paces like Patton in front of his assembled cast. And when he says “tough,” he really means it.
42nd Street moves ahead at breakneck pace (it’s one of the most streamlined musicals I’ve ever seen) and we get to meet several members of the ensemble cast in rapid succession. There’s the wise-cracking “Anytime” Annie (Ginger Rogers), the dumb-hopeful Lorraine (Una Merkel) who thinks she’s got an easy “in” with the show because her boyfriend, Andy (the excellent George E. Stone), is the choreographer. Then there’s the nice-as-apple-pie leading guy Billy (Dick Powell) whose teeth surely must have dried out from all that grinning; and the small-town girl named Peggy (Ruby Keeler in her film debut) whose eyes are so wide they threaten to swallow her entire head.
But for all the people filling the screen, the Show is the star of this show. The show is everything: it is sunlight, it is oxygen, it is the very rotation of the globe…and it always, and brother I mean always, must go on.
The script by James Seymour and Rian James captures all the backstage drama—the loves, the betrayals, the hope, the bitchery—in smart, compact fashion. Oh sure, the dialogue is unforgivably sappy to our ears (“What do you do when you’ve got two left feet like mine?” “Just pick them up and put them down”), but Depression audiences gobbled it down like cotton candy. 42nd Street proved to be just what audiences (and the hit-starved Warner Brothers) needed: a happy pill which could transport them from the bread line to the chorus line. Suddenly, everyone thought they were a star; suddenly, there was no better place on earth than Mr. Berkeley’s 42nd Street, “naughty, gaudy, bawdy, sporty 42nd Street.”
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