42nd Street (1933)
Directed by Lloyd Bacon
Broadway director Julian Marsh needs just one more hit show so he can retire and recover his health. It looks like he just may pull it off until temperamental star Dorthy Brock breaks her ankle on the eve of the show's premiere and has to be replaced by her understudy Peggy.
11 connections found
View:
11 connections, in both directions
What critics compared 42nd Street to
The screenplay by Luhrmann and Craig Pearce steals shamelessly from "42nd Street," "Camille" and any other film the writers managed to catch on the late show.
The premise is American Idol with talking (and singing) animals, but that's just the starting point for a film that borrows cheerfully from many sources: Baz Luhrmann meets Beatrix Potter, with a healthy dose of The Muppet Show and of classic Warner Brothers backstage musicals such as 42nd Street.
It's more like the elaborate shows-within-movies that the characters in "42nd Street" and "The Bandwagon" put on: full of wild imagery and containing absolutely no logic or sense.
That helps Schumacher immensely: This is a ready-made cinematic fable, a backstage story that doesn't seem stagy on film at all, thanks to its moody mix of Grand Guignol and "42nd Street."
Advertisement
Little wonder, then, that Catherine Zeta-Jones -- who began her showbiz career in the London stage production of the tap-happy "42nd Street" -- steals the spotlight (and the movie) as the vampy, va-voomy Velma.
In the first and best "Hunger Games" film four years ago, Jennifer Lawrence was like Peggy Sawyer, the Allentown, Pa., hoofer in "42nd Street."
There’s a bit of the old: The sheer terror of the Broadway critic — here played with alarming coldness by Lindsay Duncan — goes back to “42nd Street” and beyond.
DiCaprio could have been terrific if this were a boffo, over-the-top musical entertainment (an adaptation, say, of 42nd Street), or if it were a subdued fable of loss and regret (such as, I don't know, The Great Gatsby?).
Advertisement
Wild and woolly, the movie is a breathtaking head trip that hails from a long tradition of backstage melodramas: 42nd Street, A Star Is Born, All About Eve, and, yes, that kitschy '90s relic, Showgirls.
Unimpressed that Joe Eszterhas cribbed copiously from All About Eve and 42nd Street, viewers don’t even stop to address the notion that he and Paul Verhoeven—who most of the auteurist crowd have given a pass to by this point, but it doesn’t matter because Showgirls exists outside of and beyond auteurism—are directly commenting on these star-is-born pipe dreams and their culpability in force-feeding the American Dream to an audience of pop junkies.
Yes, Showgirls is a clear riff on the likes of 42nd Street and its descendants, but one of its most notable thematic arcs comes in the form of the Stardust’s shows.