42nd Street – R. Emmet Sweeney

By R. Emmet Sweeney

IFC News

December 26, 2006

The advent of sound in cinema made the movie musical possible, but also created a vexing question: how to have characters burst into song without causing the audience to burst into laughter? What was fine on stage became an unexpected problem on screen — some degree of realism was needed to keep the viewer focused on the plot instead of on the incongruity of an off-screen orchestral swell (audiences quickly tired of revue-style films which, like a vaudeville show, ran act after act with no connective narrative tissue). The simplest answer was to film the lives of Broadway performers, so that stage numbers could be folded in as an organic part of the story. The template for the backstage musical crystallized in “The Broadway Melody of 1929,” which told the story of a sister vaudeville act that hits it big and then breaks up because of a love triangle. The film was a massive hit that spawned countless imitations. The backstage musical has gone through plenty of mutations since then, but it’s really the only remnant of a once dominant genre to survive the demise of the studio system. The latest iteration is the early Oscar favorite “Dreamgirls,” which follows a strikingly similar story arc to the “Broadway Melody” of 77 years earlier.

Instead of a vaudeville act, “Dreamgirls” is focused on a Motown girl group whose rupture also comes about because of a man and his fickle heart (and thirst for power) — the manager played by Jaime Foxx. It’s not just the tried and true story formula that “Dreamgirls” has inherited from its forebears, but a whole history of technical and directorial innovation. According to Richard Barrios in his loving history of early musicals “A Song in the Dark,” “Broadway Melody” was the first musical to use pre-recorded sound and playback. Producer Irving Thalberg demanded a re-take of the big musical number, “The Wedding of the Painted Doll,” the only scene shot in Technicolor (the rest of the film is in black and white). Thalberg, wary of the costs in hiring the orchestra again, decided to re-use the recording of the first shoot and play it back over the re-take. Before this, orchestras played live into microphones right next to the stage. This created far more freedom for the director in terms of camera angles and movement, and saved a hunk on the budget.

By early 1930, theaters were saturated with backstagers, and audiences were tiring of the device. In March 1930, as Barrios notes, a headline at Billboard magazine proclaimed “Back-Stage Stories Bane to Exhibitors.” Studios scrambled to cut out musical sequences from completed films in order to avoid the backlash. The cycle seemed to have run its course in a remarkably short amount of time.

The genre didn’t bounce back until 1933, with the success of “42nd Street” and “Gold Diggers of 1933,” a remake of “Gold Diggers of Broadway” (1929) made by Mervyn LeRoy and Busby Berkeley (who directed the numbers). The major difference in these films is the increasingly artificial (and spectacular) musical sequences that strained the realism of the stage setting to the breaking point. Berkeley’s use of bird’s eye views, for example, was a perspective impossible for the filmed audience to see. The injection of frank depictions of sexuality (until the Hays Code buttoned up everyone’s brassieres) didn’t hurt either.

That year the groundwork was also being laid to move the musical sequences off the stage and into the world of the performers, the baby steps of which were taken in “Flying Down to Rio,” where Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers were first teamed up in a minor role. Their subsequent decade-long box office dominance altered the landscape, with films now gaining boldness about where to insert the spectacle. Musical numbers were still firmly integrated into the plot, usually spurred on by the flirtatious one-upsmanship of Astaire-Rogers, but no longer confined by the absolute verisimilitude to which “Broadway Melody” had clung, and at which Berkeley had slowly chipped away.

Enter MGM. The studio responsible for “Broadway Melody” in ’29 went on to exemplify the genre through the 40s and 50s, with their vaunted “Freed Unit”, manned by the producer (and former lyricist) Arthur Freed and a roll call of talented collaborators including directors Vincente Minneli and Stanley Donen, and the writing team of Betty Comden and Adolph Green. Their lavish productions attempted every kind of musical, from folk (“Meet Me In St. Louis,” 1944) to historical pastiches (“The Pirate,” 1948). Their biggest successes, though, were of the backstage variety with “Singin’ In the Rain” (1952) and “The Band Wagon” (1953). The genre had evolved to the point of self-referentiality and self-parody, those early attempts at filmed song and dance now looked at with nostalgia and humor. No more needs to be said about the former, but “The Band Wagon,” which takes Broadway as its setting, looks back even further than the advent of the sound film, pining for the days of unpretentious vaudeville performance, where star Fred Astaire got his start.

With the fading of the studio system in the 60s, the musical was doomed. Its lifeblood was in the trained hands of backstage artisans working with factory-like precision. With the breakup of vertically integrated studios, it was impossible to muster all the manpower needed and make it affordable. The days of the musical as a popular art form were numbered. Adaptations of big Broadway hits were trotted out once in a while to modest returns — but original material was hard to come by. Dramas with musical elements returned to prominence, with the success of films like “Saturday Night Fever” (1977) and “Flashdance” (1983). The full-fledged musical survived only in a variety of animated features.

With the success of “Moulin Rouge” (2001) and the film adaptations of “Chicago” (2002) and now “Dreamgirls” (2006), there’s been a mini-resurgence of the backstage form financially, if not artistically. The hyper-stylized “Moulin Rouge” runs with the self-reflexive form of backstage musical initiated by “Singin’ In the Rain.” The latter two works are more aligned with the “Broadway Melody” school, stage-bound works content to ape their original Broadway productions. But with the massive success of Disney’s TV movie and album “High School Musical,” along with the musical-inflected spectacles of “Drumline,” “You Got Served,” “Stick It” and “Step Up,” it’s the teen dance genre that seems the place to look for a “42nd Street”-style resurgence.

May 12, 2015

When sound came to cinema, the musical came along with it. The tremendous box office returns of The Jazz Singer (1927) had producers reeling, and the market was soon flooded with song and dance. But the Depression-era audiences began tuning them out, preferring the patter of William Powell to the tapping of another chorine. By 1931 the studios had slashed musicals from their slates and were brainstorming what went wrong. In the May 1931 issue of the Motion Picture Herald, Paramount’s Jesse Lasky was optimistic about the future of the genre:

A gradual but inevitable return of music to the screen is predicted by Lasky. He believes the future will bring a sprinkling of operettas, a reasonable number of musical comedies, dramatic pictures with backgrounds of symphony orchestras. Citing the public’s attitude toward musical comedies, he contends that picture audiences were given something before they were prepared for it. “There is merely a need of a little more skillful technique and a better understanding on the part of the public”, explained Lasky. “The public was not prepared for the license of the musical comedy. For years we had trained the public to realism. The stage naturally had a dramatic license which was impossible in pictures. Audiences could not get used to music coming from nowhere on the screen. Nevertheless, musical comedies will come back and the public will become accustomed to that form of entertainment. In the next two or three years they will have forgotten that there ever was any question about musical comedies.”

In 1933 all questions were dropped after the massive success of WB’s 42nd Street, a snappy, streetwise backstage musical that introduced the world to the symmetrical spectacles of Busby Berkeley’s dance choreography. Now out on a sparkling Blu-ray from the Warner Archive, it’s clearer than ever why this was the film that brought the musical back into the spotlight.

Warner Brothers hitched itself to to the coattails of FDR, and in the publicity for 42nd Street declared the film “A New Deal in Entertainment!”. The studio pitched their films at the working class, with James Cagney their pugnacious stand-in (he would star in WB’s next musical, Footlight Parade (’33)). These films depicted musicals as acts of labor, as groups of dancers, actors, singers, stagehands and directors worked together to make the show sing. Every character in the movie is looking for work, even the show’s star Dorothy Brock (Bebe Daniels) who remarks early on how the Depression has ruined her career. On the opposite end of the class spectrum is “Anytime Annie” (Ginger Rogers), who dresses up as an upper class twit, monocle and all, in order to fool the casting directors into hiring her (they see through her ruse – but cast her anyway).

Darryl Zanuck was the man who set it in motion. Studio head Harry Warner was still opposed to the musical genre after a series of flops, but Zanuck convinced him to take a chance, and assigned Rian James and James Seymour to adapt Bradford Ropes’ unpublished novel into a screenplay. Daniel Eagan suggests, in America’s Film Legacy, that Zanuck may have “fooled Harry and his other brothers into thinking the film would be a drama without songs and dances.” Whatever his rhetorical tricks, he was able to get the project greenlit. The story was about a director who risks his health to mount an expensive Broadway production. For the role of the hard-driving director Julian Marsh, Zanuck borrowed Warner Baxter from Fox, who had won the Best Actor Oscar in 1930 for In Old Arizona. The rest of the cast was filled out by WB contractees. Marsh’s leading lady Dorothy Brock was played by Bebe Daniels, who grew up on the stage, while the young ingenue role of Peggy Sawyer was given to Ruby Keeler, who was then married to talkie pioneer Al Jolson. Keeler had been offered the lead alongside Jolson in Fox’s Hallelujah, I’m a Bum, but turned it down because Jolson, according to Keeler, “would be worrying about my part as well as his own.” There was no such concern with 42nd Street, which made her a short-term star. Familiar, welcome faces like Guy Kibbee, George Brent and Dick Powell lent their inimitable support.

Julian Marsh is a sick man, but powers through a fraught rehearsal period to get the musical revue “Pretty Lady” into shape for the opening. But when star Dorothy Brock gets into a spat with the producer and source of cash, the whole production grinds to a halt. It’s up to fresh-faced newbie Peggy to step into the leading role, and it’s up to her whether “Pretty Lady” ever gets beyond previews.

The director was originally intended to be Mervyn LeRoy, but he got ill like Julian Marsh, after exhausting himself on the set of I Am a Fugitive on a Chain Gang (1932). Lloyd Bacon sat in the director’s chair instead. One of Zanuck’s cost-cutting maneuvers was to split up production – Bacon would handle all the dialogue scenes, while Busby Berkeley would get his own production unit for the musical sequences that would close the film. They worked different days on different stages, but both shared DP Sol Polito. Berkeley was coming off a trio of films choreographing dance numbers for Samuel Goldwyn, but it was at Warner that Berkeley would develop his soon-to-be famous style of overhead shots of abstracted gams moving in patterned unison. His routines in 42nd Street are fairly tame compared to what came later in his career, staying tethered to stage musical reality. Though he and Polito manage to wend a camera through the legs of a throng of lined up models, and in the final “42nd Street” number recreates the fabled NYC block with a cutout skyline and a remarkably realistic apartment block, complete with stabbings.

The movie was a huge hit, and though it is filled with enthusiasm and sunny can-do spirit, there is an undertone of resignation veined throughout, present in the character of Julian Marsh. In one of the biggest downers in backstage musical history, instead of wrapping up with the triumphant opening night performance, it ends with a slumped over Marsh, sitting half dead on the back stairs, listening as the theater goers praise Peggy and demean him, crediting her with the show’s success. Future entries in the backstage cycle always sync the culmination of backstage romance with the on-stage performance, with both narrative strands uniting in a super-happy climax. But in 42nd Street there’s a disorienting disjunct between on and off stage, admitting that during the Depression hard work might not get you anything.

Tag: 42nd Street

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