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But if 42nd Street is a love note to the tough-hearted Times Square of the Depression years, it also, almost unconsciously, serves notice that Broadway’s star is fading. Pretty Lady, the play-within-the-movie, is hopelessly hokey and stilted; the jokes are stale, the dances are drab, and even the singing has the stiff elocution of an earlier age. The feel of the movie abruptly shifts halfway through when Busby Berkeley arrives, and his inspired cinematic effects launch the action into the realm of fantasy. The girls are mounted on a rotating table—a classic Ziegfeld touch—and a camera, high above, shows them weaving some stretchy material into fantastic geometry. The girls form a row, and the camera guides us through an endless A-frame of long, perfectly tapered gams. Here is an effect that even Ziegfeld himself could never match; here is beauty closer than you’ve ever seen it before. Although 42nd Street celebrates the raffish life of Broadway, underneath, it marks the ascendancy of film and the decline of theater, and thus of that very world of Broadway.

The advent of talkies tilted what had been a close match between a classic and an upstart medium into a one-sided battle. A Broadway show in a movie was so much bigger, brighter, and dreamier than the show itself, and so much cheaper to present. You could fit two or three times as many people into a cinema house as into a theater, and you could turn that audience over two or three or four times in a day. The iron law of Times Square, and of the entertainment districts that preceded it, is that real estate is turned to its most profitable use; even in an earlier generation, it had become plain that economics favored film. The first movie theater had appeared on 42nd Street in 1910, and movie houses began replacing theaters in Times Square as early as 1914, when Vitagraph Studios turned the Lyric Theatre in Hammerstein’s Olympia into the Criterion. That same year the Strand became the first theater on Broadway built expressly for the movies, with a thirty-piece orchestra, three thousand seats—and no stage. It was there, in fact, that 42nd Street opened, for the converted theaters of 42nd Street itself, mostly dating from the first years of the century, were far too small to accommodate a blockbuster movie. By the mid-twenties, both sides of Broadway were lined with impossibly opulent movie palaces—the Rialto, the Rivoli, the Capitol, and, above all, the Roxy, with 6,214 seats, the 110-piece Roxy Symphony Orchestra, the corps of dancers known as the Roxyettes, and, of course, the Roxy ushers, whom Cole Porter was later to immortalize as the acme of swank. In 1930, the Palace, the sun around which the vast universe of vaudeville had once revolved, was wired for sound—and all Broadway mourned.

The movies very swiftly displaced theater as America’s chief form of popular culture. As the folks in Altoona decided they wanted to see movies rather than plays, those splendid theaters in every downtown in America were converted to movie houses, just as they were on 42nd Street. The number of legitimate theaters nationwide plummeted from 1,549 in 1910 to 674 in 1925; the number of touring companies dropped even more drastically. It had been the insatiable demand for real Broadway shows in towns all over the country that had provoked the theater-building spree in Times Square; with the decline in demand, Broadway had more theaters than it could fill. By the early thirties, plays were shown almost exclusively in Times Square’s side streets; the great public places of Broadway and 42nd Street showed movies.

Times Square was in many ways the movie capital of the country. As the center of the entertainment world, Broadway had the grandest movie houses in the country; as the favorite source of Hollywood’s material, it served as the eastern headquarters for virtually all the big film companies. But Broadway didn’t make the movies; Hollywood did. And so Broadway didn’t matter as it had before; the expressions that Americans had on the tips of their tongues, their favorite characters, their