It’s an old story: the rapid rise and fall of the musical in the early days of sound film, and the rescue of the genre, in extremis, by a nearly bankrupt Warner Bros., with the backstage musical “42nd Street,” featuring musical numbers by Busby Berkeley. The artistry of Berkeley remains one of the wonders of the cinema. Few filmmakers have such an instantly recognizable style, yet what he’s famous for is an odd corner of filmmaking: in the early part of his career, he directed only the musical numbers of movies—and when he did start to direct entire films, his imprint was, nonetheless, hard to detect anywhere but in the musical numbers. (I think that there is something good to say about the hectic tone of his comedy direction, but that, in any case, it would be a mere footnote to history in the absence of his musical sequences; the prime exception is his 1942 musical drama “For Me and My Gal,” where he brought out the best in the young Judy Garland, in her first adult role.)
In this clip, I discuss “42nd Street” and Berkeley’s contribution to it. There’s much more to say—including that appearances can be deceiving; the director comes to the cinema as an entertainer but turns out to be—and I mean it—a philosopher. One thing that such schematically choreographed and photographed numbers are good for is symbolism, and Berkeley, with his blend of abstraction and mimed drama, uses it to bring forth notions that would have gotten more realistic movies tangled up with censors or with producers. For Berkeley, strange as it seems, was something of a sociobiologist, who brought forth variations on the two great themes of sex and death, and who brought intimate comedies and dramas of romance together with representations of mighty, impersonal forces at work. He was also a visual genius, shooting his huge sequences with only one camera and doing the editing virtually in the camera (i.e., visualizing in advance the duration of each shot). It’s worth celebrating his work today for its manifestly ecstatic surfaces as well as for its secretly pithy substance.
