When I was an undergraduate studying TV and Theater Productions, I took a film class. The professor had a lot of obscure movies, many of them foreign, that he ran to show what different times and places produced in terms of cinema, and one of them was a Busby Berkeley musical, a strange thing where a group of people were trying to put on a show in a hotel ballroom if I remember correctly, only for the actual performance at the end to not only not match any of the dances seen in the rehearsal scenes, but also to be something so big and elaborate to be performed in the hotel, or indeed, on any theatrical stage. I don’t remember the title of the movie or the overall plot, but I do recall the class as a whole didn’t seem to care for it and the highlight may have been when a woman in the performance seemed to be knocked out the window of a tall skyscraper which actually seemed to please a number of people in the class. Essentially, the whole movie was little better than a delivery method for the big musical production at the end.
When I saw Berkeley’s name as choreographer in the opening credits for 42nd Street, I figured I was in for more of that.
It seems there’s a bit of a buzz when word comes out that producers Jones and Barry are putting on a new show. It’s a big elaborate musical, the kind they specialize in, and it will star one Dorothy Brock. There are a number of people who audition, and disaster seems to strike late in the movie when Brock twists an ankle. Can her understudy take her place? Will the director ever be pleased? And why is opening in Philadelphia such a bad thing?
OK, this was basically exactly what I thought it would be. There was a large cast, with Ginger Rogers being the only name I truly recognized, and while the songs in the rehearsal do work their way into the final show, covering the last twenty minute or so of the almost 90 minute movie, and that was the end of the movie. The characters are paper thin and, at best, puddle deep with problems that aren’t all that insurmountable, with everything turning out fine for everyone. Can I really bring myself to care that these people can put on a big song-and-dance show? Not really. The movie and its characters are far too shallow.
However, there is the matter of the large-scale Berkeley-choreographed dance production around three different songs, none of which seems to tell a coherent story when strung together. And, like the previous Berkeley movie I saw, there is no way this production was performed on a live stage, not with its elaborate sets, cars, horses, rotating platforms, and a number of other things that were clearly designed for the movie camera and not the live stage. Berkeley’s large-scale dance sequences are legendary, and I’d be lying if I said they weren’t visually impressive. As a stand-alone dance sequence, it’s something to see. The rest of the movie? Not much worth mentioning.
Though the third of the big dance sequences, the one set to the title song for the movie, did feature a woman being attacked in what looked like an attempted rape, and after her escape, she was then stabbed and killed on the street. That was rather dark given the rest of the show, and I somewhat wonder what Berkeley was doing, but I’m not sure I care enough to watch other movies of his to see if that was some kind of weird theme of his or not.
Grade: C+
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