The Favorites - 42nd Street (#63)

The Favorites is a series briefly exploring films I love, to find out what makes them - and me - tick. 42nd Street (1933/USA/dir. Lloyd Bacon, chor. Busby Berkeley) appeared at #63 on my original list.

What it is • There's a show going up, but it's no big deal. Just another Broadway spectacular, and anyway, tonight's the Philadelphia opening not the big New York premiere. Besides, the big star Dorothy Brock (Bebe Daniels) has fractured her ankle and some ingenue named Peggy (Ruby Keeler) is going on in her place, a kid who has no previous experience and is guaranteed to flop. At best, it will be a good night's entertainment - who cares? Well, just about everyone. Everyone involved with the show anyway, which means several hundred people from the chorus girls who are one dance step away from sleeping on a park bench to the pathetic producers who want to play sugar daddy for queens of the stage to the not-even-understudy-turned-star whose life is about to change to the strained, exhausted, but dedicated director Julian Marsh (Warner Baxter) whose life is maybe about to end (when we meet him, he's receiving a call from his doctor, warning him that if he proceeds with this new production he very well may have a heart attack and drop dead). Even when the show, against all odds, turns out to be a rousing success, Marsh hovers near the exit and listens to the audience members dismiss his accomplishment, claiming that Peggy - whom Marsh tirelessly trained at the last minute - deserves all the credit. He doesn't get mad or frustrated or depressed, he just sighs and chuckles to himself and sits down on the fire exit, unable to move after tossing his body and soul into the raging fire of this performance. If there's any film that better demonstrates the blood, sweat, tears and perverse sense of satisfaction that go into creative endeavors, I don't know of it. Beyond just demonstrating all of the hard work, 42nd Street mythologizes the result: the climax of the film is choreographed by Busby Berkeley to resemble nothing that could ever actually be accomplished on a theater stage (and even if it could, you'd lose the thrill of what we see, reliant as it is on cutting, angle, and camera movement). Instead, it's the fever dream of what these desperate adventures look like in the imaginations of those who envision and enact them. This is pure cinema, but it's a tribute to all forms of artistic accomplishment or, in the parlance of the unpretentious characters of this movie, show biz.

Why I like it •

Musical Countdown - 42nd Street

This is an entry in the Wonders in the Dark musical countdown - an epic enterprise; make sure you check out the whole thing!

This post consists of an essay and a video piece (not just a scene from the movie intended as an addendum, but something I actually created as an important part of my contribution to the countdown). You can take it any order, but I open with the video to highlight its relevance to this entry. It shows through juxtaposition and structure what I am saying in the essay itself, and maybe makes my point better than words can do.

The five-minute video opens with dialogue from the film, follows with a rehearsal montage set to "Getting to Be a Habit With Me" (showing the progression from casting call to finished production), and closes with the dance sequence of "Young and Healthy" in its entirety, just to show what the film was building up to. Altogether the video demonstrates how the raw and often frustrated urges of the characters for sex and power are sublimated and transmuted into the discipline of a creative act, and then shows the end result in all its glory. The essay pursues the same theme.

And don't worry - they're both fun!

•

42nd Street (1933/United States/directed by Lloyd Bacon & choreographed by Busby Berkeley)

stars Warner Baxter, Ruby Keeler, Dick Powell, Bebe Daniels, George Brent, Guy Kibbee, Una Merkel, Ginger Rogers

written by Rian James, James Seymour and Whitney Bolton from Bradford Ropes' novel • photographed by Sol Polito • designed by Jack Oakey • music by Al Dubin & Harry Warren • edited by Thomas Pratt & Frank Ware

The Story: Determined to direct a hit show, even if it kills him, Julian Marsh (Warner Baxter) struggles with romantic entanglements, last-minute injuries, and a nervous ingenue named Peggy (Ruby Keeler). Will the curtain open or come crashing down on "Pretty Lady"?

_____________

"Pretty Lady" - the stage extravaganza at the center of 42nd Street - owes its existence solely to sex. Well, don't we all? Some musicals present themselves as good, clean fun but 42nd Street, God bless its dirty face, is not one of those musicals. At the root of its massive appeal, kinetic energy, and increasingly exciting narrative and musical structure are three simple motivating factors: sex, sex, and sex. Well, a fourth too: money – and in this film the two are wound around each like the two strands of DNA.

As Chaos Theory holds that a butterfly need just flap its wings to spawn a typhoon halfway around the world, so Dorothy Brock (Bebe Daniels) has only to spread her legs. Thus is birthed a larger-than-life production, upon which the career of a broken, possibly dying director relies, through which a naïve young ingénue will become the biggest name on Broadway, and from which two hundred hustling, horny, hungry human beings will draw their daily bread (and dreams of glory). Dirty old man, sugar daddy, and cuckold Abner Dillon (Guy Kibbee) tells Dorothy he’ll do something for her (finance the show she wants to star in) if she’ll do something for him (guess what?). And with that, we’re off!

Talking, Singing, Dancing Pictures 1929 - 1934 • "32 Days of Movies" Day 3

The third chapter in "32 Days of Movies", an audiovisual tour through 366 films.

View "Chapter 3: Talking, Singing, Dancing Pictures"
(2015 update: included Vimeo embed after the jump)

Talking, Singing, Dancing Pictures

Creaky. Tinny. Stagebound. All of these adjectives have been used to describe the early talkies and, sure enough, many directors had no clue what to do with the new technology. Perhaps most did not understand sound at first (and one in this chapter, making his first appearance, didn't want to - at least for the time being). However, those who did understand used sound extremely well, perhaps even better than later filmmakers, who took it for granted. Sound can be a girlfriend screaming over the phone, a radio playing across an alleyway, a glutton burping, or the gutteral growls of a gorilla (two gorillas, actually). Or it could be the sublimely casual way someone asks, "Cigarette?"