Ninety years on, the film that set the pattern for every backstage musical is still fast, funny and unexpectedly hard about money. Warner Baxter carries the first hour, and the dance numbers, held back until the very end, are worth the wait.
Broadway in 1932 was a business in trouble, and 42nd Street treats it as one. Rian James and James Seymour, working from Bradford Ropes’s novel, write a musical in which nobody puts on a show for love. Julian Marsh needs the money because the crash took his. Abner Dillon pays because he wants the star. The chorus girls turn up because the alternative is the breadline. Lloyd Bacon directs the backstage hour as a comedy with its teeth showing, and it is still one of the best of its kind.
Warner Baxter is the reason the first hour works. Marsh is a director with a bad heart, no savings and a temper, and Baxter plays him as a man who is frightened and takes it out on everyone within earshot. He bullies the chorus through five weeks of rehearsal, sacks a girl for being late, and stands in the stalls with his hat on while the dancers drop. His face, grey under the work lights, tells you how much is riding on the show.
The women are better company. Bebe Daniels plays Dorothy Brock as a star who knows exactly what Dillon’s bracelets cost her and is still sneaking off to see Pat Denning (George Brent, doing a good deal with a raincoat and a shrug). Una Merkel and Ginger Rogers, as Lorraine and Ann, are the chorus veterans who do the talking, and Rogers, in a monocle and a borrowed accent, gets the sharpest lines. Ruby Keeler is the newcomer Peggy. She reads her lines as if they had been handed to her a minute before, and her tap is loud and flat-footed. The part asks only for freshness, which she has, and Dick Powell’s Billy Lawler, grinning at her over a piano, supplies the warmth for both of them.
Sol Polito shoots the rehearsal hall with a hard top light that throws the dancers’ shadows onto a bare floor, so the place looks like a factory, which is the point. Orry-Kelly keeps the chorus in practice shorts and vests and saves the satin for the end. Thomas Pratt and Frank Ware cut the rehearsals into short, overlapping bursts of shouting, counting and taps, and there is no slack stretch anywhere. Harry Warren and Al Dubin’s songs stay in the head for days, though for an hour you hear only scraps of them.
Nearly all of the dancing is held back until the show opens, twenty minutes from the end, and for an hour a musical has almost nothing to sing. When the numbers come, staged by Busby Berkeley, they arrive all at once. Shuffle Off to Buffalo takes place on a sleeper train that splits down the middle to show the berths. Young and Healthy sends the camera crawling along the floor between the legs of a turning chorus. The title number builds a New York street on the stage, with a stabbing in a window, a drunk on the kerb and dancers climbing a staircase holding painted boards that turn, at the top, into a skyline. We sat up. This was what the hour of rehearsal had been for, and it was larger and stranger than the plot had promised.
The plot is thin and knows it. It turns on a piece of bad luck we will not describe, though anyone who knows the phrase backstage musical will guess it. Guy Kibbee’s Dillon is a one-gag character, the rich man who cannot keep his hands to himself, and the film is franker about what a chorus girl owes an investor than Hollywood would be allowed for years afterwards. We laughed at most of it, and then felt slightly grubby about which bits.
Watch it knowing that the first hour is talk and the last twenty minutes are the dancing. The talk is good, and the dancing is the reason people still know the title.
