The Frame

Director: Lloyd Bacon
Screenplay: Rian James and James Seymour
Producer: Darryl F. Zanuck
Starring: Warner Baxter, Bebe Daniels, George Brent, Ruby Keeler, Dick Powell
MPAA Rating: NR
Running time: 89min.

“The big parade goes on for years; it’s the rhapsody of laughter and tears. Naughty, bawdy, gaudy, sporty, 42nd Street.”

Originally posted at Row Three on 1 July 2009, as a double review with Gold Diggers of 1933 in a series about the 1930s.

[xrr rating=4.5/5]

42nd Street isn’t known as the granddaddy of backstage movies for nothing – it opens with word spreading around Broadway that famed director Julian Marsh (Warner Baxter) is putting on a show, continues through auditions and rehearsals, setbacks and last-minute casting changes, and finishes with the opening night extravaganza.

Marsh is just recovering from a nervous breakdown, and this show may be his comeback or his downfall. He’s really the central character of the story, though he’s surrounded by a large supporting cast: Ruby Keeler as the bright-faced wanna-be chorus girl, Dick Powell as the peppy juvenile actor, Bebe Daniels as the big star who brings the money to the show in the form of infatuated checkbook-weilder Guy Kibbee, George Brent as the man who threatens the show by coming between Daniels and Kibbee, and Ginger Rogers and Una Merkel as the wisecracking comic relief. There’s a lot going on, and a lot of subplots, but it all holds together rather better than you’d expect.

But let’s make sure we’re a little honest here. 42nd Street isn’t a great movie because it has a cast full of great actors. Warner Baxter holds it together dramatically as Marsh, and Rogers and Merkel keep it sarcastically funny, but no one else can act at all. It’s not even a great movie because it has the best singing and dancing ever – Keeler made a lot of tap-dancing movies in her time, and compared to, say, the dancers in 1920s movies, she’s not bad, but just wait until Ginger actually got some real dancing parts, or Eleanor Powell started hoofing at MGM. That spelled the end for the relatively heavy-footed Keeler.

42nd Street works because it has a vitality and freshness that actually revitalized the musical as a cinematic form. It works because choreographer Busby Berkeley is a genius of some sort. You can’t really call a lot of what he does dancing – it’s more like geometric manipulation that has to be seen from the top or bottom or other views that could not possibly exist in an actual live theatre, but that’s just the thing. He liberated the cinema musical from its dependence on stage-bound design. And it works because of its inspired mix of cynicism and optimism that could perhaps only come out of the Depression.

It’s not five minutes into the movie that Bebe Daniels tells her wanna-be lover/investor that she can’t have her pick of shows, “not with this Depression,” but the thought is belied by her incredibly large and well-appointed apartment. Later, Marsh gives Keeler (who predictably gets bumped up from the chorus into a leading role) a pep talk largely based around how many jobs would be lost if she fails to win over the audience. Though the characters don’t constantly harp on the Depression verbally, it’s sort of a background constant, and the climactic title number – a mini-story in itself, though not as epic as some of Berkeley’s later extravaganzas – brings out the desperate mood of the times with its minor key, depictions of murder and death, and yet gives a sense of the vibrant life that continues and will continue as long as Broadway itself stands. As the song goes: “The big parade goes on for years; it’s the rhapsody of laughter and tears. Naughty, bawdy, gaudy, sporty, 42nd Street.”