Movie · 1933 · Comedy, Drama, Romance · 1h 29m · NR · English
Curator score: 5.7/10 (17.2K ratings)
The Greatest Musical Hit the Screen Has Ever Known!
Overview
Broadway director Julian Marsh needs just one more hit show so he can retire and recover his health. It looks like he just may pull it off until temperamental star Dorthy Brock breaks her ankle on the eve of the show's premiere and has to be replaced by her understudy Peggy.
Ratings
Curator score: 5.7/10
Letterboxd: 3.56/5
Rotten Tomatoes: 92%
TMDB: 6.9/10
Director
Lloyd Bacon
Production
Warner Bros. Pictures
Cast
Warner Baxter, Bebe Daniels, George Brent, Ruby Keeler, Guy Kibbee, Una Merkel, Ginger Rogers, Ned Sparks, Dick Powell, Allen Jenkins, Edward Nugent, Robert McWade, George E. Stone, Toby Wing, Louise Beavers, Charles Lane, Wallis Clark, Tom Kennedy, Harry Akst, George Irving
Curator Review
Verdict
A foundational backstage musical with Depression-era snap, melodrama, and dazzling Busby Berkeley spectacle. The plot is familiar, but the film matters for how it helped define the showbiz movie and still delivers genuine energy and charm.
Best for
classic musical fans
pre-Code Hollywood viewers
film history buffs
backstage drama lovers
viewers who enjoy lavish dance spectacle
Skip if
you need modern musical songwriting
you dislike old Hollywood acting styles
you want a tightly realistic story
you are impatient with thin plots built around big numbers
Overview
42nd Street is one of those movies where the story is mostly a delivery system for the spectacle, and that is absolutely the point. The backstage melodrama is brisk, sentimental, and full of hardboiled showbiz talk, but the real draw is the sense that the movie is inventing a language for the musical as it goes.
Worth noting
Busby Berkeley’s numbers are the reason it still feels alive: geometric patterns, impossible camera moves, and a kind of ecstatic excess that turns choreography into architecture. Even when the songs themselves are uneven, the film keeps finding new ways to dazzle, and the whole thing has a scrappy, Depression-era urgency underneath the glamour.
Bottom line
It is also a surprisingly influential film in how it frames the labor, ego, and desperation behind putting on a show. If you like seeing the template for later backstage musicals being assembled in real time, this is essential viewing.
Top Letterboxd reviews
sophie b (4★) · 829 likes
A thing I like about these movies is that the stage productions they are putting on don't seem to make any fucking sense at all.
Patrick Willems (3.5★) · 488 likes
Every 5 minutes: "oh, this is where that trope comes from"
David Sims (4★) · 380 likes
this movie really goes hard on Philadelphia
nora (4★) · 262 likes
two wild things from this movie that i can't stop thinking about:
1. at the end of a number about how great new york city is, they pull down a curtain that says "ASBESTOS" on it in big letters, and i tell you i screamed
2. during the title number a woman is literally murdered, and the camera cranes up to dick powell looking out his window down at the scene, and he just glances out casually and muses about… more