42nd Street was the first of the four monumental musicals associated with Busby Berkeley in the miracle years of 1933 and 1934. (The others were Gold Diggers of 1933, Footlight Parade, and Dames.) For a long time they were lumped together, as if they were parts of single artifact, the revolutionary Busby Berkeley spectacle-film. Contemporary audiences probably treated them that way, too. Their narratives, all backstage stories about the production of a big show, tend to be treated as generic and uninteresting. Like the equally revolutionary Astaire-Rogers films, most film historians’ focus has been on the dance routines and choral extravaganzas. That’s made it hard to view them individually. I’ve been interested in the stories; that’s what makes them comedies. I realized recently that I don’t have as vivid a memory of 42nd Street as of the later Busby B. films. Now I think I know why. The spectacles are fairly limited and the story is so dramatic and tense that for much of the film the comedy seems to be comic relief. It doesn’t feel like a joyous, celebratory comedy until the show’s finale — an affirmation of youthful energy, urban diversity and collective art, all at the expense of its “producer,” Julian Marsh (Warner Baxter).
It’s a big story, a mini-myth, basically A Star is Born seen from a great height. (It’s a puzzle to me why 42nd Street isn’t linked to that core Hollywood myth.) Like Star, it’s about the passing of the torch from the old artist to the new; but it’s also about the passing of an old, heroic medium — the Broadway stage — to a new one — movies. That theme is implicit in the other Busby B. films (it’s explicit in Footlight Parade). It’s an elegiac myth, as we watch the greatest of show producers, Marsh, fight off his own death, while inevitably hastening it by producing his own finale, a last great stage achievement. The show is a success for its stars but Marsh is destined to be excluded. The show was not for fame, but that others may live. 42nd Street is a self-sacrificial comedy.
Marsh’s show is a stand-in for lots of things in the early 1930s. The words of the title refer like nested dolls to New York City, the theater district, the diegetic show Marsh is producing, and the film itself — themselves stand-ins for American urban energy, for American musical theater as a synergy of commerce and art, for art as collective labor, and for the dream factory capable of expanding, and even transcending, live theater performance. It wraps up into one objective correlative Hollywood’s hope that movies can pull the country out of the Depression — the mass production of hope-giving dreams. The old guard has to give space to the new. To some extent the film proved its own premise. It’s said that its success saved Warner Bros. from bankruptcy — and the studio immediately plowed its profits into making three more such spectacular, uplifting Busby Berkeley distractions.
On the surface, the gaudy spectacles in 42nd Street seem even less integrated with the story than in the subsequent films. From another perspective they are far more integrated. Julian Marsh is a single-minded artist-demiurge who gifts the world with the transition from the dying to the growing. (Cagney was considered for the role of Marsh; how different the film would have been if he’d taken the role!) With his mortality always at his back, Marsh is the Romantic artist transposed to a populist and capitalist America, where the work of two hundred art-workers depends on funding by a licentious “angel” and popular success. Failure means unemployment, debt, and the collapse of the future.
In his final buck-up exhortation to Peggy (Ruby Keeler) before her debut, Julian all but demands that she pull the country out of its economic and psychic depression. Only a star can do it.
Berkeley’s previous films were all ribald Follies confections, pure and simple. In 42nd Street the seriousness and intensity of the two main plots — Marsh’s increasingly desperate efforts to perfect the show and Dorothy Brock’s (Bebe Daniels) similarly desperate attempts to hold onto her stardom at the expense of her integrity — seems to collide with the lighthearted ease of the juveniles’ plot; and it’s the juveniles’ plot that’s victorious in the end. All the Berkeley films of ’33 and ’34 are transitional films, even though they may not have seemed so at the time. They combine techniques and sensibilities of the late silents and early talkies. Their erotic joking and chorus-girl displays openly taunt the Hays Code, which was not fully enforced until 1934. In 42nd Street, though, the eroticism seems so natural, it’s not used only for comic effect.
Consider the scene when Peggy is kicked out of her boarding house because she has invited Pat Denning (George Brent) up to her rooms, and accepts Pat’s invitation to stay at his place. Denning’s intentions are complex, and so is Peggy’s response. Ruby Keeler quickly became an almost robotic embodiment of invulnerable erotic innocence, but here she knows what she’s about; she’s not an idiotic child-woman.
There’s also Bebe Daniels’s great rehearsal-performance of the wonderful Warren-Dubin song, “You’re getting to Be a Habit With Me.” (It was a hit recorded by Bing Crosby that year; bonus tracks at the end of this post.) It’s certainly not a slick routine, but Daniels is having great fun and it’s clear that she’s a saucy dame whose “habit” relishes having a plentiful, everyday “supply” of the young stuff.
Oh, those racy lyrics!
I don’t know exactly how it started,
But it started in fun;
I just wanted someone to be gay with,
To play with someone.
But now I realize that I should never let it go,
And I’ve found to tell you so.
Ev’ry kiss, every hug
Seems to act just like a drug;
You’re getting to be a habit with me.
Let me stay in your arms,
I’m addicted to your charms;
You’re getting to be a habit with me.
I used to think our love was something that I
Could take or leave alone,
But now I couldn’t do without my supply,
I need you for my own.
Oh, I can’t break away,
I must have you ev’ry day;
As regularly as coffee or tea.
You’ve got me in your clutches,
And I can’t break free;
You’re getting to be a habit with me.
But that can’t last. She’ll have to sacrifice it along with her career, just as her peer, Julian, will have to sacrifice everything else. The comic logic of 42nd Street is classical: the old are spent, and room must be given for vitality and sexy youth, laid out straight up in Billy’s famous routine, “Young and Healthy,” another great Warren-Dubin tune.
It’s clear what’s being celebrated here and The League of Decency is nowhere to be found.
I'm young and healthy And you've got charms It would really be a sin Not to have you in my arms I'm young and healthy And so are you When the moon is in the sky Tell me what am I to do? If I could hate you I'd keep away But that ain't my nature I'm full of vitamin A, say Say I'm young and healthy So let's be bold In a year or two or three Maybe we will be too old
This was Ruby Keeler’s first film. I have made many ungenerous comments about Keeler’s acting and dancing, both of which I find unbearably amateurish. She may have got her Warner contracts because she was Al Jolson’s wife. But it’s clear that she became a popular star, and she was even praised for her dancing. To me, her so-called tap is the kind that merits a participation trophy in a junior high school talent contest. Graceless, audibly clunky, eyes on her feet and arms flailing. Richard Barrios in his book A Song in the Dark: The Birth of the Musical Film explains that Keeler’s dance style had little to do with the Black tradition that Astaire assimilated. Keeler’s tap style was derived from clogging, and her shoes were fitted with wooden, rather than metal, fixtures — as in clogging, the sound of banging feet on wooden floors was a desired effect. Moreover, since she was expected to embody doll-like innocence, the smooth style of Astaire-Rogers or the ostentatious display of Eleanor Powell would have been at odds with her popular persona. In 42nd Street, Lloyd Bacon’s direction and Warner-ace Sol Polito’s camera give Keeler an aura of “knowing innocence” and even an adult human beauty drawn from the silents — an image she will never be allowed to have again.
These are passing moments, however. Keeler can’t act, sing, or dance, yet she’s entrusted with carrying the myth to completion. One of my biggest irritations with the film is that Keeler is allowed to introduce the finale, the Warren-Dubin masterpiece for which the movie is titled.
Fortunately, the showstopper is rescued by the ensuing carnival of New York diversity, the magnificent Warner house band, and the saving voice of Dick Powell. The street, the city, the art, and the country are clearly young, healthy, and well supplied.
But even here, with youth triumphant, the city alive, the show a success, maybe even the country saved, the film won’t let us forget that it all came with costs — of life, vitality, affections, and companionship.
The End.
Bonus tracks:
I’m baffled that the “42nd Street” anthem has not been covered as much as I think it deserves. The most famous and successful cover was by the Boswell Sisters with the Dorseys immediately after the film opened — daughters of the Old City of Jazz, New Orleans, celebrating the new one.
Come and meet Those dancing feet On the avenue I'm taking you to Forty-Second Street Hear the beat Of dancing feet It's the song I love the melody of Forty-Second Street Little nifties from the fifties Innocent and sweet Sexy ladies from the eighties Who are indiscreet Side by side, they're glorified Where the underworld Can meet the elite Forty-Second Street Naughty, bawdy Gaudy, sporty Forty Forty-Second Street
Here’s Bing’s 1933 hit cover of “You’re getting to be a Habit With Me” with Guy Lombardo.
Maybe one more — Sweets Edison and Ben Webster.
