The Devil's Playground_ A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square - James Traub [50]
The movie 42nd Street arrived at precisely the moment when this tawdry new Times Square was taking shape. It was based on a novel by Bradford Ropes, a thoroughly wised-up twenty-eight-year-old ex-vaudevillian, a junior version of Walter Winchell. The novel, which the novice producer Darryl F. Zanuck bought for $6,000, a very ample sum at the time, contains only a few hints of the Depression: the boys and girls in the chorus are starving, but only in the immemorial way of the Street of Broken Dreams. 42nd Street describes a world that is as pitiless and all-consuming as a meatpacking plant: when an old actor dies onstage in rehearsal, the producer’s only concern is how to hide the misfortune so as not to delay opening night. Everyone from the chorus girls to the starlet is scheming and sleeping her way to the top. Even the ingenue and heroine, Peggy Sawyer, agrees to serve as the beard to a popular homosexual dancer in order to raise her status. Peggy extenuates her hypocrisy to herself by saying, “Pardon me while I climb a few rungs on my ladder!” By the end, Peggy’s few scruples are altogether forgotten, and she is as self-important, and as hard, as everyone else in the company. But this is a familiar story: Ropes’s book is essentially a grimly desentimentalized version of the Kaufman-style Broadway satire of the late twenties, as if too many years and too many shows have leached all the delight out of the form, and out of Broadway itself.
The movie version of 42nd Street is a much stranger piece of work, a giddy extravaganza about economic desperation. While the play familiar to today’s theatergoers is the story of those plucky kids in the chorus, and the novel was the story of the implacable Show, Zanuck’s movie, which he described as a “musical exposé,” is chiefly the story of the director Julian Marsh, who has emerged from retirement despite fragile health because he has lost his entire fortune in the Crash. Marsh is a desperate and bitter figure, a screamer and a slave driver; commanding the chorus girls to hike up their skirts, he shouts, “Higher, higher, I want to see the legs!” The girls are in no position to argue, since the show is their only shot at a square meal. When Peggy at first declines the chance to step in for the show’s fallen star, Marsh cries, “Two hundred people, two hundred jobs, two hundred thousand dollars, five weeks of grind and blood and sweat depend on you! It’s the lives of all these people.” The characters are playing for much higher stakes than they had been in the world of George S. Kaufman and Ben Hecht and Irving Berlin.
But of course this is Hollywood, and the movie fantasticates its Depression setting into something every bit as delightful and improbable as the Broadway of Damon Runyon. (The Runyon stories themselves were then being rapidly converted into movies.) When the chorus sings “We’re in the Money” after one of them finds a nickel, hard times seem about as overwhelming as a toothache. Like the other Broadway movies that Hollywood churned out in a great flood in those years, 42nd Street capitalized on a national romance with Times Square that had been building for decades. The combination of crime and Depression had given this 42nd Street a darker hue. But that, too, was part of its appeal; 42nd Street is in love with 42nd Street, just as were the Broadway Melodys (1929, 1936, 1938) and the “Gold Diggers” series and all the others.