Recently I got an email and the person writing it used the word grand. Immediately I felt a bond with the writer over the use of this word, as it one of my favorite old time words. It became so during my spate of classic movie watching 2006-2008, from all the 1930s movies I watched. I watched so many movies from that era that I began to feel like I lived in that era, and spoke with the kind of sensibilities people had at the time, at least as portrayed in Hollywood movies.
"Jim, they didn't tell me YOU were here. It was GRAND of you to come."--Ruby Keeler as Peggy Sawyer in 42nd Street (1933).
On the short list of my all-time favorite scenes in cinema history. 42nd Street is a movie I've seen maybe a dozen times, mostly because it comes on and I watch it until the end. It premiered at the Strand Theater on Broadway on March 9, 1933, which means it came out five days after the inauguration of Franklin Roosevelt as President. That is no accident. The movie was part an effort by Hollywood to help Roosevelt's program for the country.
The story:
In the midst of the Great Depression, an aging producer-director, Julian Marsh (played by Warner Baxter), together with a verteran Broadway producer, persuade a Midwestern rube investor to cough up money for a Broadway show.
Marsh (Baxter) has lost everything he had in the stock market crash and needs someting akin to a miracle to pull off an exit into anything but the poor house.
The investor agrees on the condition that it will have plenty of chorus girls. Marsh and the New York producer are thrilled. Word goes and there is a huge casting call for chorus girls. They are all excited at the possiblity of working again and as they arrive for auditions, we see them recognizing each other. Among them are two blonds, played by Ginger Rogers and and Una Merkel, veterans who know most of the room. There is also a spunky little brunette Sawyer, played by Ruby Keeler, who is away from home and in the city for the first time, her wide eyes radiating innocence. The blonds will wind up taking her under their wing, and helping her survive each cut of the auditions.
Along the way Sawyer also bumps into the leading man of the show-within-a-show, played by Dick Powell (not to be consued with William Powell of the Thin Man series). Powell's character and Sawyer become quick friends, and now she has an ally and protector.
Rogers is at the top of her game for this phase of her career. Her character, Annie, aka Anytime Annie, has just enough innocence left to believe she can find happiness. At the auditions, she is posing here as upper class, with a monocle as a prop, but all the other girls know it's an act to catch a meal ticket. Playing opposite her is the other blond, Una Merkel, the pride of Covington, Kentucky, tall and lanky and with a cornball accent. Merkel is so distinctive looking that one thinks of her physicalness as being her character. Slowly they are whittled down through the calls, the piano pounding and the director Marsh fretting over every detail like he's made a bet with the devil that he needs to cover. He is relentless, never breaking a minue from the steel resolve to get the show to its premier as have an opening night success.
The show itself is a revival in the style of Florodora, an old style comedy that had debuted in 1899 in London, and known for its women with pretty white lace dresses of the Edwardian style, and parasols and flower swing sets. The idea is that people want nostalgia for happy times.
The very last girl to make the cut is the innocent spunky Sawyer. She almost sleeps through being picked for the last slot because she has worn herself out, and has been sleeping in the theater as much as possible to save money.
Meanwhile the leading lady who is playing opposite Powell is ready to retire. She only wants to get out of show business and settle down with her secret boyfriend, who is also a dancer but not welcome at the theater. This is because the leading lady has actually been making herself available as the public escort of the rube investor. He considers her his girlfriend, even though she despises him. The investor by the way is played by the ultra cuddly and loveable Guy Kibbee, a great character in probaby his finest comedy role.
. The leading lady and her secret boyfiend secretly plot to run off with each other and get married, scuttling the show if necessary. She's played somewhat as a bitch with her attitude, but one is sympathetic to her desire to quit show business and have a normal life.
Halfway through production, the director Marsh (Baxter) is watching one of the vintage 1899 musical numbers from the audience, the girls all with little white parasols, and the dancers are going through their paces. He suddenly gets disgusted and tells them to shut the whole production down. This sucks, he basically tells them. It's not 1905. Give the audience something they want. So with a couple weeks until the show opens, they will retool it with new numbers with contemporary appeal. And here Hollywood itself will undergo a revolution.
I love this scene Baxter as marsh throwing the script down in frustration---not the last time he will do that: https://clip.cafe/42nd-street-1933/wait-a-minute-wait-a-minute-s14/
Here now we see the famous Busby Berkely numbers being rehearsed. Not only do we have the first true backstage musical, but the first scenes that show the power of the movie camera combined with choreography of a large number of dancers, sometimes show from above.
"Young and Healthy". Powell blasts it out in his supernatural trumpet-like tenor voice, while singing to super blond Toby Wing, who never speaks but is simply adored amidst a sea of other girl's legs. I'm full of vitamin A!---the first vitamin to be discovered, and named only 13 years previously.
Opening nyight approaches and the numbers are set. Marsh discovers that the leading lady is sneaking off to see her boyfriend. He is afraid she will elope and leave them high and dry before opening night, which is tobe a preview not on Broadway but in Philadelphia (to the groans of the cast). So Marsh scares off the boyfriend. The leading lady freaks out. In the hotel she sprains her ankle. No way will she be able to go on stage. So her problems are over. She rebukes the midwestern rube investor who has been paying her freight in the show. He pulls his money. The show teeters in the balance. Marsh is losing his mind.
On the night before the opening, he casts about for a replacement. There is no suitable understudy available. At that moment the blonds step forward and nominate innocent Sawyer, and they are backed up by Freddie, the leading man, who has fallen for Sawyer, as she with him. With nowhere else to turn, Marsh agrees to give her a shot. He takes her into a rehearsal room in theather with the music director and hash out her lines and her numbers all through the night and next day. Her dancing is impeccable. She has the chops for that. And she can sing. But her acting is lousy. Ruby Keeler pulls off a great performance making that believable.
Her intro happens in a line were she is with friends and she runs into her crush, Jim, who is also sweet on her. Marsh has her run the line and it is a disaster.
short clip: https://clip.cafe/42nd-
street-1933/jim-didnt-tell- you-here-it-grand-of-you-come/ He pushes her and never lets up, believing in her, until she makes it believable. He brings out the star in her and sends her on stage like a nervous father. His entire life now rests with her. She succeeds and the show is an amazing hit. She is now a star. She and Freddie are co-stars and in love. The show closes with the title song, which blurs the stage and movie reality in an impossible way, ending with a shot of Keeler and Powell closing the shade on their honeymoon train (within the show on stage).
The last scene of the movie is Marsh outside the theater, sitting on the fire escape listening as the crowd files out the doors into the alley. Having never broken stride the entire movie, he has let himself relax, hunched over on the stairs in exhaustion. He is listening to the conversations of people coming. From this we learn the audience thinks it will be a hit. One remarks that Marsh is genius for discovering this new star, and the someone else says, no he was no genius, it was all her. We know he doesn't care about any of that. The show is a hit. He won. Everybody has won. Even Annie (Ginger Rogers) is happy being the new girlfriend of the rich midwestern investor, and he scurries after her obeying her instructions. Life is grand.
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