Cheap 42nd Street (DVD) (Warner Baxter, Bebe Daniels, George Brent, Ruby Keeler) (Lloyd Bacon) Price

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Customer Reviews of 42nd Street

Lush Black & White...and a fine musical to boot
First of all, if you are expecting non-stop singing and dancing, you've come to the wrong place. 42nd street is more of a backstage drama enlivened by several songs rather than what you might expect from an all-out musical. Only at the end does it make---and unabashedly so---a final push to bring down the house, so to speak. The DVD box headlines Ruby Keeler and Dick Powell, but this is a Warner-Baxter-lead ensemble. Baxter is the star even though Ruby has the spotlight at the end. (No, she isn't the best, as others herein have bemoaned, but the story is supposed to be about someone being in the right place at the right time---not great, but good enough---to be given a shot at becoming a star. That's how many stars, were in fact made, after all. Consider this angle of the issue when viewing, consequently.) George Brent, Guy Kibee, Bebe Daniels, and---my favorite supporting player herein---Ned Sparks, round out the cast. But this film has more working for it not than just able players and memorable music. This film is lush, I'd argue; not in drama and/or color---since it's in black & white of course---but lush in light. The lighting is wonderfully apparent in this film. The rich black backgrounds in the musical numbers couldn't be any blacker & the whites---blouses, tuxedo jackets, you name it---in contrast couldn't be any more livelier as a result. As I write this I see a black piano, for instance, filmed from the floor on an angle as Bede Daniels slinks aside it in a long black dress set off with a white top. Ruby Keeler is similarly arrayed, but in a lush all white dress as she "shuffles off to Buffalo." It's a brilliant film in this regard (pardon the pun); an example how black & white can sometimes best color. Do consider such when you have a look at this crisply filmed 1933 classic. (Trivial aside: Have a look at Ruby's shoes just after George Brent is punched in the face and notice that soon after---as she is carried by him from a sofa---she is wearing different ones.) Cheers!

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The Best Backstage Musical Ever!!!
"42nd Street" is the ultimate backstage musical and drama where a young chorus girl from Allentown, Peggy Sawyer (Ruby Keeler) goes out a "youngster," but comes back a "star" in her first Broadway show when the lead twists her ankle. This film is as wonderful and spectacular as ever with doll-faced Keeler perfect as the "green" hopeful (and endearingly klunky as a tapper, although true to the 30's hoofing style); Warner Baxter a superb Julian Morris, hard-nosed director, urging the kids to "pick 'em up and put 'em down"; Dick Powell, a perfect romantic complement to Keeler and in wonderful voice; the beautiful Bebe Daniels a fitting leading lady; and a chorus line of tappers including saucy, sugar-and-vinegar Ginger Rogers as "Anytime Annie." It culminates in a deliciously dazzling Art Deco musical finale with choreography by Buzby Berkeley that has never been rivaled or improved. They truly don't make 'em like this anymore. An absolute cinematic treasure. Songs include "Shuffle Off to Buffalo," "You're Getting to be a Habit with Me" and "Go Into Your Dance."

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A Study in Competing Dance Styles
Peggy Sawyer is a young woman with big wooden slats on her feet who just loves to dance (Ruby Keeler, who plays Peggy with the old style wooden taps on her shoes, had been the protege of the gangster Owney Madden in the Prohibition nightclubs of New York, and it is said that the singer Al Jolson had to pay $100,000 to release Keeler from Madden's "contract." <
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>At this distance it's difficult to see what made Ruby Keeler the center of this titanic struggle of lovers' jealousy, but she seems like a nice enough person. Her famous "clunky" style of tap was not her own invention, but she brought the style forward from turn of the century models, giving it a new kick start in some sequences here that look like she's trying to nail down the entire stage floor. Those who compare her dancing to that of Ginger Rogers are missing the point--actually, they are making an important point in that in this single film we can see several generations of dance styles combine and ignite, Keeler's nightclub stage style, a hangover from vaudeville; Rogers' new, ballroom influenced and infinitely more subtle style (which she gives only hints of in 42nd Street) and the whole dance-non-dance world of Busky Berkeley, the choreographer whose "girls" didn't really have to move a step, they can just stand there while the camera travels around them executing the movements, a totally cinematic dance creation which became one of the few original inventions in film in the early 1930s. <
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>Berkeley's massive dance creations look forward in time as well as back (to the stage models of Max Reinhardt and other "super directors") and their futuristic qualities are often noted and admired. It was a style that culminated, oddly enough, in the massed athletes and marchers assembled by Berkeley's admirer, Leni Riefenstahl, in her OLYMPIAD of a few years later. <
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>If they remade this film today they might dress Dick Powell up differently in the scene in which Peggy stumbles into Billy's dressing room, catching him in his underwear; but they couldn't cast a cuter guy or a fresher, more vibrant sexual vibe. He's fantastic in the film, and he gives Ruby Keeler sex, just as she gives him back her adoration, a mirror of ours.