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. The closing number playfully epitomizes the FDR-supporting Warner Brothers’ “New Deal in Entertainment,” pulling patriotism into the mix of illogical, irrepressible, impossible theater pieces and far, far away from the economic reality just offscreen.With film studios near bankruptcy at the height of the Great Depression, Busby Berkeley revitalized film musicals with new camera and staging techniques. The naughty, innuendo-laden “Honeymoon Hotel”-scandalously featuring Ruby Keeler and Dick Powell under the covers together-is followed by the deliciously decadent “By a Waterfall,” with each aquatic wonder supplanted by an even more outrageous, hypnogogic arrangement, as well as a sublime ending worthy of David Lynch. Like its predecessor 42nd Street, Bacon’s furious and funny storylines, revolving around love and money and backstage shenanigans, work again, and the comic plot finally explodes in a frenzy of breathtaking Berkeley marvels in motion, from overhead, abstract kaleidoscopes to flipbook animation and every dizzying formation in between. Uncannily similar to Berkeley’s initial claim-to-fame as an ingenious “show doctor,” James Cagney reveals his vaudeville background as dancer/producer Chester Kent, who devises a money-making plan to create elaborate, inventive prologues-theatrical shows that were performed live before a movie-to be farmed out to multiple cinemas.
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