Forty-Second Street

The budget for "42nd Street was set at four hundred thousand dollars, a large one for that time, particularly in view of Warners' lagging financial condition. It is doubtful whether the film would have materialized without the enthusiastic drive of Darryl F. Zanuck. His gamble paid off handsomely, and such was the zest and zip of the movie that it opened the door to a new concept in making movie musicals. Much of this was due to the appealingly bizarre and visually fascinating choreography of Busby Berkely, but it was also due to Lloyd Bacon's taut, upbeat direction.

42nd Street is the backstage, putting-on-a-show musical par excellence, and part of its success lies in the fact that Harry Warren and Al Dubin knew the territory very, very well. Perhaps because of this Zanuck decided to use them in the picture as the songwriters who rush I up on the stage and accuse harried producer Warner Baxter of ruining their song. "The story called for a bad song," Warren says, "so we wrote a clinker and called it "lt Must Be June". Baxter had to make a mess of it, and we had to protest, with him deciding to throw it out and tell us it stank. It's funny to watch the scene today. We look like a couple of gangsters.

All four of the Warren-Dubin songs became popular, with "You're Getting to Be a Habit With Me" becoming a standard. In the picture it is sung by Bebe Daniels, as a Broadway star troubled by a slipping career and a mixed-up love life. Later she breaks an ankle and a young, inexperienced, wide-eyed innocent ("You're going out there a youngster but you've got to come back a star") takes her place and becomes a smash hit. Warren says that the song came out of a casual remark on the Warners lot. "Dubin liked to kid around with the girls. One of them was Leo Forbstein's secretary. She was going around with a certain fellow, and Dubin asked her why. She said, Oh, I don't know. He's getting to be a habit with me.' We used it right away."
Busby Berkely's
treatment of the
title song.

Dick Powell had been signed by Warners a year previously, and they had used him in three small roles but he hit his stride in 42nd Street, as did Ruby Keeler, who here made her movie debut after a few appearances on Broadway. She has always been among the first to admit that hers was a slim talent, but she caught the hearts of the Depression public and many years later proved that her special appeal still had a magic quality. Of the nine pictures she made at Warners, seven were with Dick Powell, making them one of the most popular teams of the thirties.

Powell would go on to star in thirty musicals for Warners, eighteen of them with music by Harry Warren. His big solo in 42nd Street is "Young and Healthy," one of those optimistic ditties designed to boost the spirits of depressed Americans. In Berkeley's hands the song is a weird whirl of montage photography displaying a bevy of chorus girls and young Dick, who is bursting with good health. He was at this time twenty-eight but gave the impression of being younger, and his voice was still a tenor, sometimes a little strident, rather than the smooth, light baritone it would soon become.

Una Merkel,
Ruby Keeler,
and
Ginger Rogers

The finale of 42nd Street is Berkely's elaborate staging of the title song. Warren's staccato melody provides a perfect basis for tap dancing and rapidly switching camera angles. Ruby Keeler's dancing feet hammer out the message of jazzy night life in mid-Manhattan, and the chorus declaims "a rhapsody of laughter and tears" and the glory of the big parade that goes on for years. What looks like the skyline of New York bursts into squads of dancers, each manipulating a cardboard cutout of a skyscraper, and the number ends with a swift pan to the top of a building, where Dick and Ruby beam with satisfaction, as well they should.

Audiences seeing the picture early in 1933 could hardly fail to be aware that this was a breakthrough in the presentation of song and dance on the screen. Powell and Keeler, Berkely and Bacon, Warren and Dubin, all swept up by fate and thrown together in great success, almost as if in a Warner Brothers Musical. The time, the talents and the elements were in perfect harmony that could only lead to sequels.

Ruby Keeler

Al Dubin, Harry Warren, and Warner Baxter in "42nd Street" Harry and Al make an appearance as theirselves in this Real Video clip from the movie.

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