Lloyd Bacon | 42nd Street / 1933

dance until you drop

by Douglas Messerli

 

Rian James and James Seymour (screenplay, based on the book by Bradford Ropes), Harry Warren (music) and Al Dubin (lyrics), Lloyd Bacon (director) 42nd Street / 1933

 

Of all the musicals of the early 1930s, Lloyd Bacon’s 42nd Street still remains one of the freshest, not because it doesn’t have many of the usual tropes—indeed it created some of them—but because it doesn’t really begin as a musical but as a theatrical drama about the making of Broadway musical, the film getting right down to business with stage director Julian Marsh’s (Warner Baxter) speech:

“All right, now, everybody… quiet, and listen to me. Tomorrow morning, we’re gonna start a show. We’re gonna rehearse for five weeks, and we’re gonna open on scheduled time, and I mean scheduled time. You’re gonna work and sweat, and work some more. You’re gonna work days, and you’re gonna work nights, and you’re gonna work between time when I think you need it. You’re gonna dance until your feet fall off, till you’re not able to stand up any longer, but five weeks from now, we’re going to have a show. Now, some of you people have been with me before. You know it’s gonna be a tough grind. It’s gonna be the toughest five weeks that you ever lived through! Do you all get that? Now, anybody who doesn’t think he’s gonna like it had better quit right now. What do I hear? Nobody?! Good… then that’s settled. We start tomorrow morning.”

 

    We learn from the outset that Marsh is a noted stage director, but he’s had a mental breakdown and is in bad health. What’s more he’s lost most of his money with the Stock Market Crash, and he needs the musical, Pretty Lady, to be a hit in order for him to financially survive and to maintain his claim to theater magic. Yet the doctors have warned that the strain may be too much for his health. In short, he has everything to gain against the possibility of losing whatever money his has left, his career, and even his life.

     So too do the three major female stars, Dorothy Brock (Bebe Daniels), Ann Lowell (Ginger Rogers), and newcomer Peggy Sawyer (Ruby Keeler) need the musical’s success not just for their financial survivor but to make their careers. Dorothy is dating the backer of the show, Abner Dillon (Guy Kibbee), but her real love is her former partner, Pat Denning (George Brent) whose luck has run bad and refuses not only to be a kept man but to play second string to the obnoxious Dillon. Ann, known as “Anytime Annie” (a sort of precursor of Oklahoma’s Ado Annie) just needs the job, while for newcomer Peggy it’s what she has dreamed of and lived for all of her short life. Along with other excellent cast members such as Dick Powell playing Billy Lawler, Ned Sparks as co-producer Barry, comedian Una Merkel as Lorraine Fleming, and Edward J. Nugent as Terry Neil, a chorus boy, the film’s cast seems, moreover, to have almost everything going for it, as it immediately gets down to business with the multiple of collage stomping feet and back stage antics.

      Most of the urgency is centered entirely on the show, although to protect his show and keep his star Dorothy around to please the investor Marsh does hire two gang-like goons to scare off Dorothy’s old boyfriend Pat.

      Unlike Bacon and Busby Berkeley’s Wonder Bar made the following year, and which would wink and nod at the sexual eccentricities of its theater folk and the night club’s regular audience, 42nd Street basically just accepts them.

      From the very first scene when Abner Dillon finishes reading over the theater contract Dorothy’s just signed for the new show, he suggests that he’d like to do something more for her—that is if she’ll do something for him, the film making it quite clear what he has in mind.   

      When Anytime Annie shows up to audition, dance director Andy Lee (George E. Stone) comments that “She only said no once and that’s only because she didn’t hear the question.” And when the innocent Peggy shows up, the girls give her the go-round by suggesting that she might find the man in charge behind the first door on her left, which just happens to be the men’s room.

     When she realizes her mistake, they shout that it’s the door across the hall, which just happens to be performer Billy Lawler’s (Powell) dressing room. Billy does not at all mind escorting the new pretty lady to Marsh, falling in love with her almost on first sight. And the very first thing required of the auditioning dancers is to lift up their dresses to show off they legs.

  

    Dillon leans forward to leer, while Barry sarcastically quips, “And they’ve got pretty faces too.” Andy suggests to Marsh that he keep the first three—one of them being Lorraine, his girlfriend, the second Annie and the third Peggy, who they’ve just befriended. Marsh’s comment: “I suppose if I don’t [keep them] you’ll have to.”

     When another freshly hired girl lists her address as Park Avenue, Annie jokes, “And is her homework tough!”

      In the end they find that they’re one girl short, Billy suggesting they use Peggy, who’s now been cut and is sleeping behind some of the sets.

      In short, right from the start, it becomes clear that if you want to be a chorus girl or even the lead star, you better not only have the looks but a man behind you. The theater, it is apparent, is a sexist place.

      Yet, oddly, despite all the sex which the film suggests goes on behind the scenes, the film itself seldom focuses on sexual relationships, primarily because Marsh, with which the film is fixated, works them so hard.

      Marsh himself, moreover, unlike almost any other such movie, is a man without a girl. In the very middle of the film, the night before the musical finally is about to open, he calls over the dance director Andy who is about to head out his girlfriend Lorraine. Marsh looks tired and troubled. He tells Andy to sit down.

      “Anything wrong Mr. Marsh?” Andy asks.

      “Everything’s wrong.” Marsh sits down next to Andy, putting his hand on Andy’s arm.

      “No, you’re a great director, Mr. Marsh.”

     “Maybe I was, but right now I’m a sick man. I was sick when I started, but I started anyway. Andy, I’m gonna finish and going to have a show. Oh, I know what they’ll say, they’ll like it. They’ve got to. They’ll say Marsh is a wizard. He turns them out like clockwork. He isn’t human, he’s a machine. Well, I’m not a machine Andy.” He turns to Andy and puts his arm around him.

      “And for the first time I’m counting on someone else. I’m counting on you. And tomorrow night we’ll give them a show. What are you doing? You got a date tonight?”

      Even with Lorraine standing just out sight, Andy answers “No.”

      “Come on home with me tonight, Andy. I’m lonesome.”

      Since Andy up until this point has only had his eyes for the girls, particularly Lorraine, the event not only seems queer, but out of place. According to film commentator Larry Duplechan, in the original book by Bradford Ropes, however, Marsh was a gay man who kept Billy Lawler (the Dick Powell character) as his lover. The scene above, accordingly, is the only element left from the original gay story. Even here it appears that Marsh could be gay, but what he wants with Andy is left to pure speculation.

      Soon after the musical’s star Dorothy turns her attentions away from her musical moneyman Dillon and is ready to return to her ex-partner Pat; she also turns her ankle, forcing Marsh to turn his attentions to Peggy, teaching her the ropes in a long 20-hour session just before the opening.

 

      And director Bacon, who has basically saved up all the musical numbers for the grand finale, ends his film with a series of true knockouts, "Shuffle Off to Buffalo," "(I'm) Young and Healthy," and the title song "42nd Street"—all brilliantly choreographed by Busby Berkeley—which sends the theater audiences of the fiction out to the streets commenting, with Marsh standing near to overhear, that although the show’s a hit, the real star is Peggy, the director surely not deserving the credit for such a great talent.

       Marsh, cigarette in his mouth and looking utterly exhausted, sits alone on the fire escape knowing this will be his last production.

        Evidently, movie audiences were convinced that it was hit as well, the film saving Warner Brothers from bankruptcy.

 

Los Angeles, June 18, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2024).