
Renowned Broadway producer/director Julian Marsh is hired to put together a new musical revue. It's being financed by Abner Dillon to provide a starring vehicle for his girlfriend, songstress Dorothy Brock. Marsh, who is quite ill, is a difficult task master working long hours and continually pushing the cast to do better. When Brock breaks her ankle one of the chorus girls, Peggy Sawyer, gets her big chance to be the star. She also finds romance along the way.... (Full plot summary below)
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Renowned Broadway producer/director Julian Marsh is hired to put together a new musical revue. It's being financed by Abner Dillon to provide a starring vehicle for his girlfriend, songstress Dorothy Brock. Marsh, who is quite ill, is a difficult task master working long hours and continually pushing the cast to do better. When Brock breaks her ankle one of the chorus girls, Peggy Sawyer, gets her big chance to be the star. She also finds romance along the way.
Leave your thoughts about 42nd Street.
| Mountain Xpress (Asheville, NC)Ken HankeThe classic backstage musical, still great |
| Chicago TribuneMichael WilmingtonThe liveliest and one of the most tuneful screen musical comedies that has come out of Hollywood. |
| LarsenOnFilmJosh LarsenThis may be the definitive Busby Berkeley-choreographed musical simply because the entire movie revels in the sort of things that Berkeley’s elaborate dance numbers revel in: innuendo, flirtations and flesh. |
| Chicago ReaderDave KehrThis 1933 film is the best known of the Warner Brothers Depression-era musicals, though it doesn't compare in dash and extravagance to later entries in the cycle. |
| Classic Film and TelevisionMichael E. GrostFilm benefits from great musical numbers and its portrait of the show's director, one of the few well-developed gay characters in a 1930's Hollywood film. |
| The New YorkerPauline KaelThis 1933 film is the best known of the Warner Brothers Depression-era musicals, though it doesn't compare in dash and extravagance to later entries in the cycle. |
| Filmcritic.comChristopher NullOf Golden Age musicals, 42nd Street is about as close to the archetype as they come. |
| Goatdog's MoviesMichael W. Phillips, Jr.The strength of a musical is its songs, and this film had a mixed bag. |
| Tim Dirks' The Greatest FilmsTim Dirks42nd Street (1933) is the classic, fast-paced, backstage movie musical - a refreshing film that changed the film musical forever and saved Warner Bros. studios from bankruptcy |
| San Francisco ExaminerJeffrey M. AndersonBusby Berkeley's astonishing choreography is singularly cinematic and still astonishing. |