The threat of unemployment hangs over the characters who appear early in the film, from Julian Marsh (played by Warner Baxter), a Broadway producer who has lost his money and health, to the girlish Peggy Sawyer (played by Ruby Keeler). Still, the film’s script and its first production numbers were fully grounded in the realities of the Depression. Both directors understood that the Depression audience needed hope, not more depression. The directors emphasized the Cinderella theme of this backstage musical, replacing the tearful sentimentality of many earlier musicals such as Al Jolson’s The Singing Fool (1928), which had involved, among other things, a dying child. Veteran cameraman Sol Polito was in charge of filming at both. He directed production numbers at one site, while his colleague Lloyd Bacon worked with the rest of the script at another. He had never had a dancing lesson, and he did not know much about cameras or photography when he was brought to Hollywood in 1930 to direct dance numbers for Eddie Cantor and Mary Pickford.īerkeley had run out of work by the time he was assigned to Forty-Second Street. Both experiences would influence his Hollywood career. Berkeley had been dance director for twenty-one Broadway musicals, and as a soldier during World War I he had devised trick-drill patterns to allow the movement of masses of men in close formation. believed the musical still had a future, although he did not tell his bosses that he had a musical in mind when he brought Busby Berkeley to the studio. Forty-Second Street Defines 1930’s Film Musicals (1933) Film Musicals, Forty-Second Street Defines 1930’s (1933) Musicals, Forty-Second Street Defines 1930’s Film (1933) Forty-Second Street (film) Motion pictures Forty-Second Street Motion-picture directors Busby Berkeley Musical motion pictures Forty-Second Street Choreography musical motion pictures United States 1933: Forty-Second Street Defines 1930’s Film Musicals Motion pictures 1933: Forty-Second Street Defines 1930’s Film Musicals Dance 1933: Forty-Second Street Defines 1930’s Film Musicals Entertainment 1933: Forty-Second Street Defines 1930’s Film Musicals Berkeley, Busby Keeler, Ruby Powell, Dick Baxter, Warner Bacon, Lloydĭarryl Zanuck, then employed by Warner Bros., Warner Bros. By then, the Depression had forced many studios near bankruptcy, and in 1933, some twenty-five hundred theaters had been forced to close. In 1928, sixty were released, but in 1932, only fifteen were released, and only two of those made a profit. As a result, the first musicals failed at the box office. Apparently, studio directors did not realize that sloppy dancing, tawdry sets, and poor costumes, while sometimes effective on the stage, would appear ridiculous when magnified many times over on the screen. Early sound cameras were almost immobile, since any motion created noise that was magnified on the sound track most early musicals were therefore photographed as if the camera were a member of the audience. In the late 1920’s, when sound films began to replace silent films, Hollywood studios produced a flood of musicals. With film studios near bankruptcy at the height of the Great Depression, Busby Berkeley revitalized film musicals with new camera and staging techniques.
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