https://clip.cafe/42nd-street-1933/experience-s1/
I left out one important thing in that previous about this movie, which is how does Marsh get Sawyer across the finish line so she can act in the part of the leading lady?
At first it seems hopeless. After several terrible attempts on her part to say that line, he asks her, in desperation: "have you ever been in love? have you ever kissed a man before?"
She looks at him with the doe eyes of a baby sister and says no. Marsh is gobsmacked. How can this possibly work? After a beat, he does the only think he can think of: he grabs Sawyer and leans her back into a passionate kiss. Then he sets her back on her feet in place. She is slightly dazed but rather happy in the moment, and Marsh, now the director again, says to her with conviction, "now---now say the line!!"
She does, and Ruby Keeler does the transition perfectly---still innocent but very much with believability that she is meeting her sweetheart.
https://clip.cafe/42nd-street-1933/jim-didnt-tell-you-here/
Even then Marsh has to drive her to exhaustion learning the numbers:
https://clip.cafe/42nd-street-1933/i-cant-i-cant-s15/
Then before the curtain comes up, Marsh gives her one last pep talk backstage, full of clichés. He has reached his limit of what he can do for her, and the show. She just looks at him with the solid confidence of young woman, as if to say Of course, Mr. Marsh, I've got this.
https://clip.cafe/42nd-street-1933/sawyer-listen-me-you-listen-hard/
The curtain comes up. She nails the line:
https://clip.cafe/42nd-street-1933/why-jim-didnt-tell-you-here/
And she becomes an star. She knocks it out of the park in her first number, and backstage Marsh grabs her by the shoulders and tells her good start. But you've got keep at it. Then realizes he's shaking this tender flower. She doesn't need his help anymore. He can let her go.
She repeats that line one more time, at the very end of the show-within-a-show, when she is the honeymoon train with Billy (Dick Powell). Here the line is a throwaway, perhaps impromptu on her part, and she delivers it back as her normal person, without affectation, because this is genuine on her part as a woman:
https://clip.cafe/42nd-street-1933/billy-it-grand-of-you-come/
Bonus: Ginger Rogers at her finest sarcastic wit as Annie, with Una Merkel (as her pal Lorraine) sliding in at the end to giver her a pat on the back
https://clip.cafe/42nd-street-1933/it-must-have-been-tough-on-mother-not-having-any-children/
Ginger Rogers is probably my favorite actress of that era, if you ask me, but I have a special fondness for Una Merkel, who remained a character actress for the 1930s, typically the extra blond in an ensemble cast. Here she is delivering one of her most memorable lines from 42nd Street:
https://clip.cafe/42nd-street-1933/all-right-get-in-line/
Remember that 1933 is still pre-code. 42nd Street is not particularly bawdy by standards of that day (compared to say, the Jean Harlow movies of that era), but it does remind one sometimes that the Hays code has not yet been enforced--both for imagery and story lines--as it would be starting in the middle of 1934.
Rogers and Merkel have a Vaudeville duet routine throughout the movie. Here is an off-color joke that would have sailed by the children, but that adults of the era would understand:
https://clip.cafe/42nd-street-1933/i-always-said-she-a-nice-girl-shes-good-her-mother/
They have alternate lines in "Shuffle Off the Buffalo" and a newlywed couple probably being destined for divorce. That line would not be allowed in just a little over a year.
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| Una Merkel, Ruby Keeler, and Ginger Rogers in 42nd Street. |
Merkel had a long career, acting up through the 1960s on television, and being nominated for an Academy Award in 1961 for Summer and Smoke, based on the Tennessee Williams play. None of this I knew until just now, but now I will be looking out for her.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Una_Merkel
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