Movies about backstage drama tend to fall into one of two emotional categories: awestruck wonder and cynical self-martyrdom. Classic behind-the-scenes melodramas and comedies burst with the joy of being in a boom industry in which even the most nobly starving artist can be true to themselves and hit it rich with just the right work. Then there are the revisionist films, the ones that paint art as, at best, something that will consume human life to produce timelessness. (At worst, it just kills you to make crap.)
42nd Street beget the backstage musical, and it occupies a middle ground between the ebullient and reflective films that followed. Made in the twilight of the Pre-Code years, the film opens in the mire of the Great Depression; famous director Julien Marsh (Warner Baxter) has been left destitute by the crash, and he plainly yearns for one final hit not to go out on top, but to go out eating something other than cat food. The grueling audition and rehearsal process he sets up speaks less to his perfectionism than the simple fact that in this climate, nothing less than a massive success will land a director future funding.
The cast he rounds up fill out a number of stereotypes. Peggy Sawyer (Ruby Keeler), is a fresh-off-the-bus naïf who doesn’t have the good sense not to backtalk Julien or to wipe that slack, touristy grin off her face before it gets her mugged. Lorraine (Una Merkel) and Ann (Ginger Rogers) are chorus line dancers who’ve been around long enough to know every trick of behind-the-scenes behavior, from manipulative men to haughty rival actresses, and treat their very existences as an ongoing comedy in which they are the co-leads. Around these women is the constant spectre of male harassment, rendered in far more forthright terms than would be allowed again for decades. The first scene of the film, for example, does not even involve Julien but rather the diva Dorothy Brock (Bebe Daniels), whose star power does nothing to defend her against a lecherous old producer who asks for a “favor” from her for financing her latest vehicle.
As grim as those moments are, however, the film nonetheless takes an ultimately admiring view of show business. Granted, it’s easy to forgive trespasses against you when the prize for your endurance is the chance to be in a Busby Berkeley dance number. Like all Berkeley musicals, the aesthetic split between the work of the credited director, in this case Lloyd Bacon, and the choreographer’s takeover of the dance scenes is so vast as make the film seem like two movies stitched together.The final 20 minutes belong to Berkeley, who takes the blunt visual comedy and racy dialogue of the rest of the film and transforms it into visual poetry. By any measure, the show that Marsh puts on is, at best, a charming distraction filled out by capable performers embroiled in pleasantly corny scenarios.
But the Berkeley sequences turn the play into a work of the avant-garde, placing the action on a darkened stage with only a spotlight facing straight down to illuminate the dancers. A rotating platform lets two lovers get dizzy from romance while simply lying on the ground, but suddenly men appear all around them, and the disc raises to reveal another tier, and then another, as God’s-eye-view shots reveal the intricate patterns of the undulating bodies. The camera in the final act unlatches itself from the cumbersome, static shackles placed on movies in the early sound era and returns to some of its silent grace, weaving through splayed legs and gliding up to strange angles to display the full dynamism of any group gesture. If early musicals leveraged music as a way to showcase talkie technology while distracting from the banal aestheticism it initially created, 42nd Street is one of the first demonstrations that cinema could enhance performing arts, to take those forms into places they could not go on their own.
A/V
Warner Archive’s Blu-ray line continues to impress. 42nd Street unavoidably suffers from the gauzy, low-texture quality of many films from the early talkie age, but the Blu-ray maximizes fine detail without ever sanding away the flaws that give such films part of their throwback charm. Consistent grain levels keep the filmic quality intact, while the film’s soft blacks and whites sparkle with whimsical joy. The mono track is flat and bluntly mixed, but again, tinny, awkwardly separated sounds are part and parcel with movies of the period. Still, hiss has been cleaned up as well as possible, and the brassy showstoppers ring with clarity.
Extras
Warner’s disc comes with a handful of brief extras, many of which are period bonuses that add to the sense of having a classic night at the movies. A newsreel of Columbia football players visiting the Warner backlot and being regaled by Berkeley’s dancers is amusing, as is an old studio tour. There are also clips of composer Harry Warren playing piano at a party, footage of the train that went around the country promoting the film, and a few Merrie Melodies, as is often the custom with releases of classic Warner movies. The meatiest extra, a 20-minute featurette in which a group of historians discusses the movie, is informative, if light.
Overall
Warner Archive salutes one of the studio’s great musicals with the best A/V transfer it has ever received.
