42nd Street

Everyone knows 42nd Street (1933), the movie musical that invented most of the clichés infesting the genre.  The show must go on.  Naïve chorus girls submit to the "casting couch."  When the tough-as-nails leading lady breaks her ankle, a winsome chorine from the boondocks substitutes for her and becomes a star.  With only five hours to rehearse, the show's director mercilessly drives the girl proclaiming that the results will be either "a star of the musical theater or a dead chorus girl."  During the climactic song-and-dance numbers, cameras on overhead cranes record identically dressed women arrayed as the petals of great winking blossoms or regimented to embody strangely surrealistic rotating gears within gears.  A camera at floor level glides through a corridor formed by the spread calves and lower thighs of chorus girls to finally frame the two young lovers cuddling in a pool of radiant light.  (42nd Street is the first movie musical featuring extensive choreography and effects by Busby Berkeley.)  The film is pre-code and is rife with raunchy, almost inexplicable, sexual innuendo.  (Apparently, it was forbidden to pronounce the work "belly" on film -- so a song and dance number involving a shotgun wedding highlights the forbidden word by, first, having someone say it, and, then, abashedly, substitute the euphemism, "tummy.")

I've seen the film a number of times and, for me, the picture always delivers something unexpected, some quirk, or tone to the proceedings that I had hitherto not noticed, or not recalled.  During this viewing, I noticed a couple features to the movie that didn't register with me before.  First, the film is driven by a sense of panic.  The Great Depression has just occurred and the director needs a hit in order to simply survive and pay his creditors.  Everyone seems hungry, frightened, cynically ready to sell themselves for a little money.  42nd Street is very much a product of its times and, certainly, manifests a kind of profound anxiety as to the very sort of entertainment, glitzy and erotic production numbers, that it features.  Second, the picture is pretty explicit with respect to sex.  Casting couch sexual harassment is depicted as the norm in show business -- as in The Producers, big Broadway musicals require "angels" and the money invested by these people seems to be provided as a quid pro quo for sex.  The climactic sequence showing a "just-married" couple "shuffling off to Buffalo" features various kinds of double entendre set in a sleeper car in which the honeymooners are incongruously bedded with a whole dormitory of pajama-clad and cynical platinum blondes -- it's not clear whether these women are supposed to be lesbian couples although, certainly, this seems to be one possibility.  A dignified-looking African-American Pullman Porter picks up shoes from beneath the sleeper berths and the episode ends with him falling asleep while shining a pair of ladies high-heeled shoes.  The big final production number, a wild, sprawling dance sequence set to the song "42nd Street" is genuinely startling.  This number is huge and lavishly detailed:  there are stilt-walkers, dwarves, prostitutes and cops street musicians and hustlers and all sorts of the demi monde depicted on the street and within the rooms of the joints overlooking the sidewalk.  In effect, we are shown a "city symphony" -- a portrait of life in great metropolis immediately after the Depression.  The song is sharp and abrasive and has more than a few hints of the kind of music Kurt Weill wrote for Brecht's lyrics in The Threepenny Opera and The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahogany --it's raw tough music, with a taut satirical edge, all bent blue notes and jazz saxophones.  Furthermore, the dance sequence actually erupts in violence -- a rapist or murderer pursues a young woman who beats him away and, then, dives out of window onto a ledge from which she, then, hurls herself.  One of the themes of German expressionism, clearly influential on this sequence, is the Lustmoerder (the "Lust-Murder") and 42nd Street comes perilously close to depicting this sort of thing, emblematic of the depravity and anomie of the great city, in the final song-and-dance number.  At the end of song, we see the stage raked sharply upward toward a vista of grim black behemoths, mighty skyscrapers with their Babylonian setbacks (they are like ziggurats) towering over the stage in a dim, black void.  These sets are based on Hugh Ferriss' architectural images in his 1929 book on skyscrapers, The Metropolis of the Future, huge monoliths suspended against a shadowy abyss.  Like workers in Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1926), the dancers march upward in a great phalanx, each of them seeming to carry a blunt, heavy tombstone on his or her shoulders.  When the phalanx of the dancers reaches the top of the ramp, they spin around and we see that the tomb-stones and obelisks that they were lugging upward toward the cyclopean buildings above are, in fact, small four or five-foot tall images of skyscrapers -- no humans remain on the stage.  Instead, we see the dancers transformed into buildings, a forest of them standing at the foot of the higher ranges of steel and concrete sierra.  This is all startling and disquieting.   The city grows monstrously but it's lightless, a dark empire of buildings that sprout in the darkness like mushrooms.  The audience roars its approbation and the crowd pours out of the theater into the dark, greasy-looking night and, then, we see the director (Warren Baxter) whose efforts have made the little chorus girl into the star of Broadway -- he is disheveled and at the end of his tether and he collapses on a stoop while men in tuxedos and women in evening gowns hustle pass him, commenting among themselves that the young woman is a star and that her talent is unmistakably authentic and natural and that the director, collapsed in a crumpled and anonymous heap among them, had nothing whatsoever to do with her success.  It's a curiously downbeat, almost tragic, ending.