Under the Spell of Joan Blondell and Those Big Baby Blues

                       

                                     Joan Blondell--the whole package.

She was the brassy blonde who had been there, done that, and lived to tell about it.  A wise cracking working girl with the biggest blue eyes ever, an electric smile, and a plump figure that turned heads and got attention.  She could scheme and connive with good humor.  Underneath the veneer of urban cynicism, though, you just knew she was capable of undying loyalty to lovers and friends alike.  That was the persona Joan Blondell brought to Warner Bros. in 1930 and which sustained a career that spanned 40 years.

Rose Joan Blondell was born on August 30, 1906 in Brooklyn to a pair of vaudevillians, comedian Ed Blondell and Kathryn “Katie” Cain, an Irish-American hoofer.  Baby Joan was first thrust on stage at just four months old as the daughter of Peggy Astaire in The Greatest Love.  She would be given lines and bits of business in the family act by age four

The family toured relentlessly and Joan did not know a real home until her teenage years.  By then in addition to becoming familiar with hotel rooms in cities across the country, she and her family spent a year in Hawaii and toured Australia for six years.

                                        

                                                        Before blond--Miss Dallas, 1926 age 20.

The family finally settled in Dallas, Texas where she managed to finish school.  Under the name Rosebud Blondell, she won the 1926 Miss Dallas Pageant and placed fourth in the fifth outing of the Miss America Pageant in Atlantic City, New Jersey later that year. 

The next year, 1927, Blondell tried her hand at North Texas State College in Denton where her mother was working as an actress.  Education didn’t take.  Show Biz did.  She worked as a model and a circus show girl before heading for the Big Apple and a bit of fame.

Blondell joined a stock company and worked regularly in small parts, including stints on Broadway.  Her big break came in 1930 when she was paired with a charismatic young hoofer named James Cagney in the play Penny Arcade.  It only ran four weeks, but the show and its young stars wowed Al Jolson, Broadway’s biggest star and the man who had helped save Warner Bros. with his breakthrough talkie, The Jazz Singer. 

Jolson bought rights to the play and then turned around to sell it to Warners with the provision that Cagney and Blondell had to re-create their parts.  Jack Warner agreed but wanted to change her name to Inez Holmes.  Blondell flatly refused, endangering her big chance in the movies.  Rather than risk losing the property and perhaps Cagney as well, Warner relented.  But it would be far from the last time that Blondell clashed with the notoriously dictatorial studio boss.

                        Blondell and James Cagney made an impression in Warner Bros.' Sinner's Holiday in 1930.

Released as Sinners Holiday the movie was Cagney’s film debut.  The second film Blondell made for Warners, Office Wife had already been released.  In that one she had a supporting role as the sister of the female lead and stole the show handing out world weary advice while getting into or out of revealing underwear.

Sinners Holiday established the screen personas of both Cagney and Blondell.  Cagney shot to immediate stardom.  Blondell was along for the ride.  She would co-star with the actor six times, more than any other actress in his career.  The films included Public Enemy, Footlight Parade, and Blond Crazy.  Cagney later said the only woman he ever loved other than his wife was Joan Blondell.

If Cagney shot to top stardom, Blondell never quite reached that level despite her great popularity with audiences.  Men adored her and women felt like she could be their best friend.  But the studio already had one blond bombshell, Jean Harlow.  Another up-and-coming young actress with a street-wise persona, Barbara Stanwyck played working class girls in edgy and darker material.   Blondell’s close friend Betty Davis was a fast-rising star and would soon be dominating serious and prestige parts.  Ruby Keeler, Jolson’s wife, was the musical star.  And young Olivia de Havilland would soon sew up all of innocent sweetheart parts.  The studio even had extra sassy comic blonds like Glenda Ferrell.

In pre-Code flicks Blondell frequently dished out wise cracks and world weary advice in various states of undress, revealing lingerie, or even from the bath tub.  Seen here on loan to Fox in 1933 with a more modestly covered up Ginger Rogers in Broadway Bad.

So, the studio wasted Blondell’s time in shorts and relegated her to the sassy best friend in over 50 feature films.  She, her sex appeal, body, and sass were perfect for the pre-Production Code naughtiness for which Warners was famous.  She was cast in fallen women pictures—Illicit with Stanwyck in the lead, Big Business Girl with Loretta Young, Night Nurse again with Stanwyck, The Greeks Had a Word for Them in a rare first billed lead, and Thee on a Match with Ann Dvorak and pal Bette Davis.

The studio also put her in their down-on-their-luck Depression stories like Union Station with Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. as an improbable hobo and Central Park in which two down-and-outers forced to live in the title park fall in love, are separated, and exploited in a scheme to rob a charity ball.

                                    Blondell spent a lot of screen time answering the phone in her underwear or a peekaboo robe.

Blondell was making as many as six pictures a year plus shorts when she married cinematographer George Barnes in Phoenix, Arizona on January 4, 1933.

Musicals were another staple of Warners in the early 30’s.  The fact that Blondell was not a singer and only a so-so dancer did not prevent the studio from casting her as a chorine and pal of the leads.  Most famously she co-starred in Gold Diggers of 1933 in which she performed in a semi-spoken wail/moan Busby Berkley’s epic Forgotten Man number.  That one song may have been Blondell’s finest dramatic performance.  It was on the set of this movie that Blondell met boyish singer Dick Powell who would become her second husband.

The heart wrenching Forgotten Man number from Busby Berkley's Gold Diggers of 1933 was a highlight of Blonell's career.

Warners would pair her with that otherwise cracking blonde, Glenda Ferrell, in six films most notably Gold Diggers of 1937.  The characters were different in each film, and most were straight comedies.  By the mid-Thirties the Production Code office killed the fallen woman genre and limited the amount of time the well-endowed Blondell could spend in lingerie or taking baths.  And the public tired of musicals.  Warners turned to gritty gangster flicks, high flown women’s dramas, prestige historical bio-pics, and swashbucklers.  Davis had the women’s film sewed up, de Havilland’s bosom heaved for Errol Flynn, and Blondell was too urban for most costume dramas.  But she was perfect for gangster films.  She re-teamed with Cagney in He Was Her Man and with Edward G. Robinson in Bullets or Ballots.

Through the later ‘30s Warners used Blondell almost exclusively in comedies.  Scripts got lamer, budgets cheaper, co-stars second rung.  She was in danger of slipping into B movie unit films like her erstwhile partner Glenda Ferrell had with the Torchy Blaine girl reporter series.

Blondell and husband Dick Powell escaped Warner Bros. and made I Want a Divorce together at Paramount in 1940.  A harbinger of things to come?

When her contract with Warners expired in 1939, Blondell cheerfully left her long time home to become a free-lance actress.  Husband Dick Powell left the studio about the same time.  Parts were harder to come by and Blondell was nearing 40.  She teamed with her husband in a preachy comedy I Want a Divorce in 1940.

But now she was lucky to make one or two films a year.  The high points during the War years were Topper Returns, Lady for a Night at Republic Pictures with John Wayne, and Cry Havoc, a gritty war drama about Army nurses at Bataan  for MGM in 1943.

As disreputable Aunt Sissy in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn in 1945 with her proper sister played by Dorothy McGuire.

Blondell would not appear on the big screen for nearly two years.  And when she did, she was a revelation.  As Aunt Sissy in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn she was the scandalous relative of the poor but respectable Nolan family who collects men who may or may not be other women’s husbands.  Blondell considered it her finest film work.

Blondell and Powell divorced in 1944.  In ’47 she married for the third, last, and most disastrous time to charming but profligate theatrical impresario Mike Todd.  She described her relationship with him as the great, passionate love of her life.  But Todd was a spendthrift, heavy gambler, and a cad by nature.  It did not take long for him to spend his way through Blondell’s money leaving her essentially broke.  The couple divorced in 1950 with Blondell alleging physical abuse including being dangled out of a hotel window by her ankle.  A few years later Todd swept Elizabeth Taylor off of her feet then died in a plane crash.

In 1951 Blondell reached the pinnacle of her post-war career in The Blue Veil starring Jane Wyman as a self-sacrificing nurse to young children.  Wyman was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress and Blondell was nominated for Best Supporting Actress.

She appeared sporadically on the big screen after that, mostly in comedies most notably The Opposite Sex, a musical re-make of Clair Booth Luce’s The Women  with a cast headed by Dick Powell’s next wife, June Allison and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? starring Tony Randal in which she reprised her pal/companion persona to Jayne Mansfield.

After that Blondell worked mainly on television where she appeared as a guest star in programs like Playhouse 90, Lux Playhouse,  Adventures in Paradise, The Untouchables, Dick Powell Theater, Death Valley Days, The Virginian, Wagon Train, The Twilight Zone, Burke’s Law, Bonanza, Dr. Kildare, The Lucy Show, My Three Sons, Slattery’s People, The Man From Uncle, Family Affair, Guns of Will Sonnet, Petticoat Junction, That Girl, The Name of the Game, McCloud, Love American Style, The Rookies, Medical Center, New Dick Van Dyke Show, The Snoop Sisters,  Police Story, and Fantasy Island.

She also was in more than a dozen made for TV movies and had reoccurring or regular series roles in.  The Real McCoys, Here Come the Brides, and Banyon.  

Blondel as the dealer in a high-stakes poker game in The Cincinnati Kid with Steve McQueen, Karl Malden, and Edward G. Robinson.  Ann Margaret got the voluptuous girlfriend part she would have played thirty years earlier. 

Among Blondell’s later appearances on the big screen were a memorable turn in The Cincinnati Kid in 1965 as an experienced dealer in a high-stakes poker game, Support Your Local Gunfighter in ‘71, Won Ton Ton: The Dog Who Saved Hollywood in ’76, Grease in’78, and the re-make of The Champ. She was featured in small parts in two more films released after her death.

Center Door Fancy was an autobiographical novel written by Blondell that was published by Delacorte Press in 1972.

Joan Blondell was diagnosed with leukemia and died in a Santa Monica hospital on Christmas Day 1979 at the age of 73.  She was laid to rest at Forest Lawn Cemetery.

Those of us who love this stuff delight in stumbling on her old Warner Bros. films, no matter how slight the plot, on Turner Classic Movies and basking in that sensational smile. 

42nd Street—The Flick That Danced and Sang Its Way into the Heart of Depression America

 

Ruby Keeler and Dick Powell, the breakout stars of 42nd Street received fourth and fifth billing respectively on the movie poster.

When it premiered at the Strand Theater in New York City on March 9, 1933 42nd Street broke new ground for the American movie musical and struck a chord with Depression-weary audiences.  The reviews were practically ecstatic and when it opened nationwide on Mach 11 there were lines at the box offices.  The movie went on to earn Academy Award nominations for Best Picture and Best Sound.  It became the template for a slew of film and stage musicals down to this day which is why many who see it now for the first time think it is cliché ridden.  It was not—it invented those clichés.  When audience first saw it, it was as fresh as a strawberry off the vine.

It was produced by Warner Bros. which was then challenging mighty MGM with its seemingly limitless resources, vast stable of stars, and glossy product as the most influential Hollywood studio.  Warner/First National had come on strong since it introduced practical sound in 1928 with Al Jolson’s Jazz Singer.  Although the Vitaphone process was soon technologically superseded by sound-on-film, the early edge gave the studio a chance to establish an audience with musicals.  When the Depression hit, it nimbly responded.  

While MGM continued to churn out prestige costume dramas and drawing room tales replete with vast art deco mansions, white tie and tails, and ladies swathed in silks and furs, Warner countered with struggling shop girls, down on their luck big city Joes, and gangsters.  It developed its own set of rising young stars who did not speak in the cultured Mid-Atlantic accent so common in MGM films, but in the clipped slang of the streets—James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, Joan Blondell, and Barbara Stanwick.  It reveled in the license of the pre-Motion Picture Code era to push the envelope on sexual themes, innuendo, and as much pulchritude and flesh as possible without inviting police raids.

But by the early Thirties, audiences had tired of Warner’s stiff and stage-bound musicals.  MGM  joined the fray with new musicals with splashy production numbers.  It was known to have a backstage musical, Dancing Lady with its hottest stars Joan Crawford and Clark Gable in the early stages of development.

Ruby Keeler, Ginger Rogers, and Una Merkle joined the chorus.

In a bid to win back the musical audience, Warner Bros. turned to a popular novel, 42nd Street by Bradford Ropes.  It quickly snapped up the rights to the theatrical romance and named one of its top directors, Mervin LeRoy, to helm the project.  The first thing LeRoy did was to suggest bright young starlet Ginger Rogers as “Anytime” Annie Lowell, the sexually easy chorine who was a key supporting character.  LeRoy was dating Rogers at the time.  But he was not able to complete the casting or make the film. 

When he fell ill, Warner assigned less prestigious journeyman Lloyd Bacon to take over behind the camera.  More critically, Busby Berkley, who had worked on the popular Eddie Cantor musicals at the Samuel Goldwyn Studio where he invented the parade of faces of chorus girls, was brought on to choreograph and supervise the musical numbers.  That gave him complete control of the most critical elements of the film from camera placement and movement to editing.

For the songs Warner paired Broadway composer and hit maker Harry Warren with veteran lyricist Al Dubin who had penned among other songs Tip Toe Through the Tulips.  It was the first collaboration of the duo who went on to write 60 hits together and work on many of the most successful musicals of the ’30s.

Daryl F. Zanuck was the actual producer even though he never got screen credit and virtually every star on the Warner lot was considered or tested for the cast.  Ginger Rogers nearly lost her part to established star and Jack Warner favorite Joan Blondell, but Zanuck stood up for LeRoy’s original choice.   Suave silent movie carryover Warren William was considered for the demanding and harried stage director Julian Marsh.  But William had recently been typed as a ruthless, caddish businessman in a series of Pre-code pot boilers and it was feared audiences would expect him to seduce a naïve chorus girl.  Instead, the part went to another silent era veteran, the square jawed Warner Baxter who exuded integrity as he struggled with illness, cast melodrama, and financial disaster to get the show to production.

Bebe Daniels was the ostensible female lead and got top billing. 

The ostensible female lead role was Dorothy Brock, an ambitious actress/singer who leads on show angel Abner Dilton (Guy Kibbee) to bankroll the show on the condition that Brock get the starring part.  Brock, meanwhile, still carried a torch for and secretly saw her out-of-work former vaudeville partner Pat Denning.  Denning was played by Warner’s fallback leading man through the ‘30’s, the ever-wooden George Brent.  Kay Francis and Ruth Chatterton were both considered to play Dorothy, but the part ultimately went to Bebe Daniels. 

Daniels was a former child star who broke out as leading lady opposite Rudolph Valentino in Monsieur Beaucaire.   When talkies came in, she showed that she could sing when she starred in the hit Rio Rita in 1929.  Warner picked up her contract from Radio Pictures in 1929 and cast her in dramas, most notably as the murderous vixen in the first version of the Maltese Falcon opposite Ricardo Cortez as Sam Spade.   After the success of 42nd Street Daniels was one of the top Warner female stars until her retirement from films in 1935 to live in London with her husband.

The key role of the female juvenile lead, Peggy Sawyer, was first shopped to Loretta Young who had some ballet training but not the tap-dancing skills necessary to carry Berkley’s elaborate production numbers and her singing voice would have to be dubbed.  Zanuck cast Ruby Keeler, the relatively unknown Broadway chorus girl and hoofer who happened to be married to Al Jolson.  Keeler exuded youthful fresh-faced charm as the naïve country girl in the big city.  She had a pleasant, but not spectacular singing voice of somewhat limited range but could dance up a storm.  Although she was later be eclipsed by tap queens like Eleanor Powell and Ann Miller she wowed audiences in 1933. From the waist down she tapped flawlessly but she sometimes seemed to flail her arms as if she was about to lose balance and fall over. 

Keeler tapping up a storm and flailing her arms.

She remained a big star at Warner through the early and mid ‘30’s but her star began to fade at the end of the decade when she was dropped by the studio and was reduced to cheapo productions like Columbia’s Sweetheart of the Campus with Ozzie Nelson and Harriet Hilliard in 1941.  After that humiliation she retired.  After making a 1963 TV series version of The Greatest Show on Earth with Jack Palance and doing a cameo in one forgettable 1970 film, Keeler made a spectacular comeback in 1972 in the Broadway revival of No, No, Nannette.

In the film the green-behind-the-ears Peggy Sawyer was taken under the wings of been-there-done-that chorus girls “Anytime Annie” and Lorraine Fleming played by Una Merkel, Warner’s ubiquitous best friend in all films where that part was not taken by Joan Blondell.  Early on she ran afoul of director Julian Marsh but ultimately won his respect.

Powell and Keeler rehearsing with the chorus.

The male juvenile lead, Billy Lawler, always belonged to boyishly handsome Dick Powell, a former band singer and Vocalion recording star who had a strong light tenor voice.  It was his second film, following a minor role as a singing bandleader in Blessed Event a year earlier.  He sang his way through a string of Warner hit musicals often teamed with Keeler and/or Blondell before reinventing himself as a film noir tough guy after World War II and as a television producer/director/host/guest star in the ‘50s.  He died of cancer in 1963 at the age of 53.  His cancer may have been caused by exposure to radiation while directing John Wayne in the Genghis Kahn mess The Conqueror on location near the Nevada nuclear test sites.

In the book director Julian Marsh and Billy Lawler were lovers.  Although Warner often used apparently gay characters as comic relief in the pre-Code era it was a bridge too far for sympathetic lead characters.  Lawler romantic attention was shifted to Peggy Sawyer, who was also his partner in the most important production numbers.

The plot, such as it is, turned on the guilt-ridden triangle between the backer Dalton, star Dorothy Brock, and old flame Pat Demming.  When Marsh discovered that Brock was “cheating” on the angel by secretly seeing Demming, he desperately sent some hoodlum pals to rough up and scare Demming away.  The boyfriend decided to leave rather than jeopardize his lover’s chance at stardom.  Meanwhile during rehearsals, Brock sang You Are Getting to be a Habit With Me which had a double meaning for her.  She also did a run through of It Must Be June with Billy Lawler and the chorus.

Warner Baxter comforts Bebe Daniels as the show is thrown into crisis when she breaks her ankle as Keeler and Baxter look on.

Right before the crucial out of town opening in Philadelphia Brock broke her ankle and was unable to go on the same night she quarreled with Dalton and ended their relationship.  The eager “Anytime” Annie was right there to move in on the rich man.  Dalton insisted to the desperate Marsh that Annie get the lead.  But Annie surprised everyone by saying that she can’t carry the show but knows who can—the here-to-fore timid Peggy Sawyer.  Marsh was dubious but had no choice.  He had less than a day to drill Sawyer in the part.  He told her “I’ll either have a live leading lady or a dead chorus girl.”  Then there is a montage of him mercilessly driving her right up to an hour before curtain time.

As the show was about to go on Dorothy Brock arrived to give her blessing to Sawyer and the show and to announce that she and Pat Demming were getting married.  So, apparently, were “Anytime” Annie and her bald fat cat, Guy Kibbee.  With romance in the air Billy Lawler, who mooned over Peggy but was too shy to make a move got up the nerve to tell her he loved her and gave her a passionate kiss. 

Baxter's last moment pep talk to Keeler.

Just before the show went on, Marsh took Peggy aside for one last pep talk and the most memorable line of the film, “Sawyer, you’re going out a youngster, but you’ve got to come back a star.”  With all of the plot threads tied up in pretty bows, the last twenty minutes of the film were given over entirely to three Berkley production numbers which blended into one another featuring Keeler, Powel, and the chorus—Shuffle off to Buffalo, I’m Young and Healthy, and the title number. 

Just as the movie ended with a cheering audience, so did the film in countless theaters.  Warner Bros. was so confident that they had a hit that much of the same creative team and cast were already working on an even bigger follow-up, Gold Diggers of 1933.

Busby Berkley's spectacular 42nd Street finale with Keeler just before the New York skyscrapers begin to dance.

The movie was listed as #13 on the American Film Institute (AFI) list of the greatest American films of all time, was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress for being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”

It inspired David Merrick’s Broadway production of 42nd Street in 1980 which was directed by Gower Champion.  It was Champion’s last show.  After curtain call for the instant hit, Merrick took to the stage to announce that Champion had died that afternoon.  The show had a successful run in London’s West End and on national tour.  It was revived on Broadway in 2001.

And when the movie pops up on TCM, I stop whatever I am doing and sit down to watch.  I am never disappointed.

 

42nd Street—Danced and Sang Its Way into the Heart of Depression America

Ruby Keeler and Dick Powell, the breakout stars of 42nd Street received fourth and fifth billing respectively on the movie poster.

When it premiered at the Strand Theater in New York City on March 9, 1933 42nd Street broke new ground for the American movie musical and struck a chord with Depression-weary audiences.  The reviews were practically ecstatic and when it opened nationwide on Mach 11 there were lines at the box offices.  The movie went on to earn Academy Award nominations for Best Picture and Best Sound.  It became the template for a slew of film and stage musicals down to this day which is why many who see it now for the first time think it is cliché ridden.  It was not—it invented those clichés.  When audience first saw it, it was as fresh as a strawberry off the vine.

It was produced by Warner Bros. which was then challenging mighty MGM with its seemingly limitless resources, vast stable of stars, and glossy product as the most influential Hollywood studio.  Warner/First National had come on strong since it introduced practical sound in 1928 with Al Jolson’s Jazz Singer.  Although the Vitaphone process was soon technologically superseded by sound on film, the early edge gave the studio a chance to establish an audience with musicals.  When the Depression hit, it nimbly responded.  

While MGM continued to churn out prestige costume dramas and drawing room tales replete with vast art deco mansions, white tie and tails, and ladies swathed in silks and furs, Warner countered with struggling shop girls, down on their luck big city Joes, and gangsters.  It developed its own set of rising young stars who did not speak in the cultured Mid-Atlantic accent so common in MGM films, but in the clipped slang of the streets—James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, Joan Blondell, and Barbara Stanwick.  It reveled in the license of the pre-motion picture code era to push the envelope on sexual themes, innuendo, and as much pulchritude and flesh as possible without inviting police raids.

But by the early Thirties, audiences had tired of Warner’s stiff and stage-bound musicals.  MGM had joined the fray with new musicals with splashy production numbers.  It was known to have a backstage musical, Dancing Lady with its hottest stars Joan Crawford and Clark Gable in the early stages of development.

Ruby Keeler, Ginger Rogers, and Una Merkle joined the chorus.

In a bid to win back the musical audience, Warner Bros. turned to a popular novel, 42nd Street by Bradford Ropes.  It quickly snapped up the rights to the theatrical romance and named one of its top directors, Mervin LeRoy, to helm the project.  The first thing LeRoy did was to suggest bright young starlet Ginger Rogers as “Anytime” Annie Lowell, the sexually easy chorine who was a key supporting character.  LeRoy was dating Rogers at the time.  But he was not able to complete the casting or make the film. 

When he fell ill, Warner assigned less prestigious journeyman Lloyd Bacon to take over behind the camera.  More critically Busby Berkley, who had worked on the popular Eddie Cantor musicals at the Samuel Goldwyn studio where he had invented the parade of faces of chorus girls, was brought on to choreograph and supervise the musical numbers.  That gave him complete control of the most critical elements of the film from camera placement and movement to editing.

For the songs Warner paired Broadway composer and hit maker Harry Warren with veteran lyricist Al Dubin who had penned among other songs Tip Toe Through the Tulips.  It was the first collaboration of the duo who would go on to write 60 hits together and work on many of the most successful musicals of the ’30’s.

With Daryl F. Zanuck as the producer even though he never got screen credit, virtually every star on the Warner lot was considered or tested for the cast.  Ginger Rogers nearly lost her part to established star and Jack Warner favorite Joan Blondell, but Zanuck stood up for LeRoy’s original choice.   Suave silent movie carryover Warren William was considered for the demanding and harried stage director Julian Marsh.  But William had recently been typed as a ruthless, caddish businessman in a series of Pre-code pot boilers and it was feared audiences would expect him to seduce a naïve chorus girl.  Instead, the part went to another silent era veteran, the square jawed Warner Baxter who exuded integrity as he struggled with illness, cast melodrama, and financial disaster to get the show to production.

Bebe Daniels was the ostensible female lead and got top billing. 

The ostensible female lead role was Dorothy Brock, an ambitious actress/singer who leads on show angel Abner Dilton (Guy Kibbee) to bankrolls the show on the condition that Brock get the starring part.  Brock, meanwhile, still carried a torch for and secretly saw her out-of-work former vaudeville partner Pat Denning.  Denning was played by Warner’s fall back leading man through the ‘30’s, the ever wooden George Brent.  Kay Francis and Ruth Chatterton were both considered to play Dorothy, but the part ultimately went to Bebe Daniels. 

Daniels was a former child star who broke out as leading lady opposite Rudolph Valentino in Monsieur Beaucaire.   When talkies came in she showed that she could sing when she starred in the hit Rio Rita in 1929.  Warner picked up her contract from Radio Pictures in 1929 and cast her in dramas, most notably as the murderous vixen in the first version of the Maltese Falcon opposite Ricardo Cortez as Sam Spade.   After the success of 42nd Street Daniels was one of the top Warner female stars until her retirement from films in 1935 to live in London with her husband.

The key role of the female juvenile lead, Peggy Sawyer, was first shopped to Loretta Young who had some ballet training but not the tap dancing skills necessary to carry Berkley’s elaborate production numbers and her singing voice would have to be dubbed.  Zanuck cast Ruby Keeler, the relatively unknown Broadway chorus girl and hoofer who happened to be married to Al Jolson.  Keeler exuded youthful fresh faced charm as the naïve country girl in the big city.  She had a pleasant, but not spectacular singing voice of somewhat limited range but could dance up a storm.  Although she would later be eclipsed by tap queens like Eleanor Powell and Ann Miller she wowed audiences in 1933. From the waist down she tapped flawlessly but she sometimes seemed to flail her arms as if she was about to lose balance and fall over. 

Keeler tapping up a storm and flailing her arms.

She remained a big star at Warner through the early and mid ‘30’s but her star began to fade at the end of the decade when she was dropped by the studio and was reduced to cheapo productions like Columbia’s Sweetheart of the Campus with Ozzie Nelson and Harriet Hilliard in 1941.  After that humiliation she retired.  After making a 1963 TV series version of The Greatest Show on Earth with Jack Palance and doing a cameo in one forgettable 1970 film, Keeler made a spectacular comeback in 1972 in the Broadway revival of No, No, Nannette.

In the film the green-behind-the ears-Peggy Sawyer was taken under the wings of been-there-done-that chorus girls “Anytime Annie” and Lorraine Fleming played by Una Merkel, Warner’s ubiquitous best friend in all films where that part was not taken by Joan Blondell.  Early on she ran afoul of director Julian Marsh but ultimately wins his respect.

Powell and Keeler rehearsing with the chorus.

The male juvenile lead, Billy Lawler, always belonged to boyishly handsome Dick Powell, a former band singer and Vocalion recording star who had a strong light tenor voice.  It was his second film, following a minor role as a singing bandleader in Blessed Event a year earlier.  He would sing his way through a string of Warner hit musicals often teamed with Keeler and/or Blondell before reinventing himself as a film noir tough guy after World War II and as a television producer/director/host/guest star in the ‘50’s.  He died of cancer in 1963 at the age of 53.  His cancer may have been caused by exposure to radiation while directing the John Wayne in the Genghis Kahn mess The Conqueror on location near the Nevada nuclear test sites.

In the book director Julian Marsh and Billy Lawler were lovers.  Although Warner often used apparently gay characters mostly as comic relief in the pre-Code era it was a bridge too far for sympathetic lead characters.  Lawler romantic attention was shifted to Peggy Sawyer, who was also his partner in the most important production numbers.

In the film, the plot, such as it is, turned on the guilt ridden triangle between the backer Dalton, star Dorothy Brock, and old flame Pat Demming.  When Marsh discovered that Brock was “cheating” on the angel by secretly seeing Demming, he desperately sent some hoodlum pals to rough up and scare Demming away.  The boyfriend decided to leave rather than jeopardize his lover’s chance at stardom.  Meanwhile during rehearsals Brock sang You Are Getting to be a Habit With Me which had a double meaning for her.  She also did a run through of It Must Be June with Billy Lawler and the chorus.

Warner Baxter comforts Bebe Daniels as the show is thrown into crisis when she breaks her ankle as Keeler and Baxter look on.

Right before the crucial out of town opening in Philadelphia Brock broke her ankle and was unable to go on the same night she quarreled with Dalton and ended their relationship.  The eager “Anytime” Annie was right there to move in on the rich man.  Dalton insisted to the desperate Marsh that Annie get the lead.  But Annie surprised everyone by saying that she can’t carry the show but knows who can—the here-to-fore timid Peggy Sawyer.  Marsh was dubious but has no choice.  He had less than a day to drill Sawyer in the part.  He told her “I’ll either have a live leading lady or a dead chorus girl.”  Then there is a montage of him mercilessly driving her right up to an hour before curtain time.

As the show is about to go on Dorothy Brock arrived to give her blessing to Sawyer and the show and to announce that she and Pat Demming are getting married.  So, apparently were “Anytime” Annie and her bald fat cat.  With romance in the air Billy Lawler, who mooned over Peggy but was too shy to make a move got up the nerve to tell her he loved her and gave her a passionate kiss. 

Baxter's last moment pep talk to Keeler.

Just before the show goes on Marsh takes Peggy aside for one last pep talk—the most memorable line of the film, “Sawyer, you’re going out a youngster, but you’ve got to come back a star.”  With all of the plot threads tied up in pretty bows, the last twenty minutes of the film were given over entirely to three Berkley production numbers which blended into one another featuring Keeler, Powel, and the chorus—Shuffle off to Buffalo, I’m Young and Healthy, and the title number. 

Just as the movie ended with a cheering audience, so did the film in countless theaters.  Warner Bros. was so confident that they had a hit that much of the same creative team and cast were already working on an even bigger follow-up, Gold Diggers of 1933.

Busby Berkley's spectacular 42nd Street finale with Keeler just before the New York sky scrapers begin to dance.

The movie was listed as #13 on the American Film Institute (AFI) list of the greatest American films of all time, was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress for being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”

It inspired David Merrick’s Broadway production of 42nd Street in 1980 that was directed by Gower Champion.  It was Champion’s last show.  After curtain call for the instant hit, Merrick took to the stage to announce that Champion had died that afternoon.  The show had a successful run in London’s West End and on national tour.  It was revived on Broadway in 2001.

And when it pops up on TCM, I stop whatever I am doing and sit down to watch.  I am never disappointed.