Movie eye-candy reached a new level in the 1930s with the Busby Berkeley musicals. People at the time were dazzled by Berkeley’s intricate kaleidoscopes in a way that CGI-jaded audiences today may never feel. While Hollywood was still figuring out sound on film and most directors rarely moved their camera at all, choreographer Berkeley and director Lloyd Bacon were panning and dollying all over the set with enthusiasm. They stumble a few times, sure. There’s a weaving dolly shot at the end that looks like the cameraman is drunk and on roller skates, but only a real Grinch would care. There’s a poignant energy to this film, which is why it’s aged well over eighty years later.
42nd Street is also a perfect exhibit of classic Warner Brothers’ head-on treatment of The Great Depression (the other major movie studios didn’t come close). It’s a pessimistic, sarcastic film that hangs with the lowlifes. Its characters are broke chorus girls truly singing for their supper and nervous businessmen and creative people who lost it all in the big bust of 1929 and are now one flop stage show away from climbing to the top floor of the Empire State Building to see if they can fly.
In most musicals, the characters burst into song spontaneously throughout the story, reality flapping out the window on wings of sweet melody.
Not so here. When these character sing, they’re either performing in a show or rehearsing for it. Music in this movie is not an emotional release; it’s a difficult, precious JOB. Harry Warren and Al Dubin’s songs, while great, are never the point. What matters is that the characters—lead by Ruby Keeler’s novice young performer—get through them without getting fired by Warner Baxter’s taskmaster director. Each number is a test.
All musicals must be dreamy fantasies though, and that’s where Mr. Berkeley comes in with visual ideas that make zero sense for this film’s theater stage, but that glisten off the movie screen just fine. No matter what else happens in the script, his choreography is a climax all by itself.