I’ve been in love with theatre for my entire life, but it wasn’t until a few years ago that I began to truly appreciate film as its own art form. This series features films that display theatre and the lives of actors, directors, writers, and dancers who inhabit the stage. So if you’re itching to watch a film that knows your life in theatre, check out 42nd Street, our first film, featured below.
42nd Street (1933)
Directors: Lloyd Bacon and Busby Berkeley
Starring: Warner Baxter, Ruby Keeler, Dick Powell, and Ginger Rogers
What happens:
In the depth of the Great Depression in 1933, Pennsylvania native, Peggy Sawyer (Ruby Keeler), goes to New York and auditions for a new Broadway musical, Pretty Lady. She is taken under the wing of two well-known chorus girls; she’s also fawned over by two men — the show’s ingenue lead and a vaudeville actor who is secretly dating the show’s female lead, Dorothy Brock (Bebe Daniels). Peggy must fill in for Dorothy on opening night after a series of mishaps, and Peggy finds her place in the spotlight after weeks of doubting herself.
Why it matters:
An essential thing to know about this film is the year in which it was released — 1933. 42nd Street is a Pre-Code film — it was released before the Motion Picture Production Code (or the “Hays Code”). Adopted in 1930, but not strictly enforced until 1934, the Code greatly restricted what could and could not appear in film, specifically explicit or implicit references to sexuality, infidelity, questionable morals, drugs, violence, miscegenation, or political dissonance (to name a few). 42nd Street breaks the first four (drugs in respect to alcohol); the movie was brazen compared to the films that came after it.
When the girls, including Peggy, must stand in a line-up for the director Julian Marsh (Warner Baxter) to make cuts, the girls must lift their skirts high above their knees to their upper thigh; right before Peggy’s first entrance during the opening night performance, a kick-line of dancers is shot from below, revealing the underwear of the chorus girls; in a later scene onstage, the camera moves beneath and between the legs of the chorus dancers, showing the inside of over a dozen women’s legs. These kind of scenes and shots were not uncommon before 1933, but after the Code began being enforced, they ceased altogether.
42nd Street features many aspects of theatre that make our industry what it is: embarrassing casting calls where we’re judged based on physical appearance, long rehearsals with tired directors, complicated relationships (and love triangles) among castmates, and emergencies that require us to fill in at, literally, the last minute.
This film is featured in Part I of “Theatre in Film”. See below for the others in Part I.
- Stage Door (1937)
- Les Enfants du Paradis (Children of Paradise) (1945)
- All About Eve (1950)
- Limelight (1952)
*Banner image from 42nd Street. Copyright © 1933 Warner Bros. Pictures.