GRADE: A

By the time of its release in 1933, many filmmakers and studio executives had concluded that the Hollywood musical had run its course. Some theater owners even went so far as to post “Not a Musical” on their marquees for fear potential patrons would go elsewhere if they thought the theater’s latest feature was a musical.

Those same feelings were present at Warner Brothers as well, but some there, notably Jack Warner, believed there was still life left in the genre, one that had come to dominate the early days of modern American motion picture production. Warner was convinced it was the content of these inferior musicals and not the form that audiences had grown tired of. And with rapidly advancing technology that only a handful of years earlier had helped to usher in the talkies, Warner envisioned making musicals that would be less set-bound and subject to the limitations of the stationary camera.

The big leap came in the form of what is known as “post-synchronization,” a technique that allowed the sound to be recorded separately and subsequent to the actual filming (the technique is still very much in use today). By relying on post-synchronization, filmmakers freed themselves from the confines of conventional filmmaking methods, allowing them to utilize moving cameras, creative angles, crane shots, overhead points of view, cross-cutting and other techniques, many of which audiences had never seen before in musicals specifically and films in general.

“42nd Street” was one of the first results of these innovations, and it became a huge box-office hit, furthering the career of its director, Lloyd Bacon, and cementing Busby Berkeley as the pre-eminent master of choreography. Both are in top form in “42nd Street,” the film that almost single-handedly reinvented the musical, extending the genre’s popularity for another two decades.

Like many musicals, there’s not an abundance of plot, but its “backstage” story (based on Bradford Ropes novel) would become a template for countless others that used the behind the scenes machinations of a stage production as the source for narrative intrigue.

Many future stars are featured, including a young Dick Powell, Ginger Rogers and Ruby Keeler, each as aspiring stars intent on pitching in after the backers of the show in which they were to appear run out of money. Together with Bacon and Berkeley they create some of the most eye-popping sequences ever put to film—the spectacular finale is still standard study at any credible filmmaking school. And considering everything on screen pre-dates modern special-effects and the kinds of computer generated illusions that have become commonplace in film, theirs is a magnificent achievement indeed.

When the roster of the best and most influential films is filled, no doubt it will include such films as “Birth of a Nation,” “Citizen Kane,” “Wild Strawberries,” “King Kong,” “Seven Samurai” and others. Whichever those others turn out to be, “42nd Street” should rightfully be among them. The musical may have lost much of its appeal, but “42nd Street” remains the kind of triumph of the imagination that will never grow out of style.

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