Forty~Second Street* (Warner). When talkies started, producers naturally tried to make musical pictures. They failed so conspicuously that it is only in the last year or so that they have had courage to try again. Forty-Second Street is an elaborate experiment which Hollywood hopes will justify a new series of musicomedies in film.
If Forty-Second Street succeeds, it will not be because of its plot, which is the old one about a pretty chorus girl getting her chance to star and making good at the opening performance. The formula works out badly in this case because it is handled with cumbersome efforts to achieve atmosphere and because it delays almost indefinitely the best part of the picture, the show-within-a-show which the producers were ingenious enough to call, not Forty-Second Street, but Pretty Lady. The dance routines by Busby Berkeley are a good deal like the ones he did for The Kid from Spain—dances unlike those in any real musicomedy but well suited to the camera's eye which inspects them from unexpected and effective angles. There are two lively songs: "Shuffle Off to Buffalo" and "Forty-Second Street."
Most attractive ingredient in Forty-Second Street is just what you might not expect—Ruby Keeler (Mrs. Al Jolson), who failed to make a Broadway success in her own right because her voice was too small and who was persuaded to make her cinema début in this picture because she has pretty legs and can tap dance. Ruby Keeler's utter inability to act is far more appropriate to her rôle than any feigned incompetence could possibly be. It gives Forty-Second Street a charm which the efforts of the rest of the cast—George Brent, Guy Kibbee, Dick Powell and Warner Baxter (as a nerve-ridden musicomedy director)—fail to provide. Good shot: Ruby Keeler drawling her consent when the juvenile, in a state of pop-eyed enthusiasm, asks her to marry him.
Hard to Handle (Warner). In his recent expositions of modern careers of danger & daring, James Cagney has been a gangster, gambler, taxidriver, auto-racer and sneak-thief, all with perfect Brooklyn-Irish sangfroid. In Hard to Handle he is a flip, beady-eyed, irresponsible publicist, as unlike Ivy Lee, to whom he compares himself, as possible. When he promotes a marathon dance he falls in love with one of the contestants (Mary Brian) and has to run away from her mother (Ruth Donnelly) when his partner steals the prize money. Disaster, as usual, encourages Cagney. He promotes a treasure hunt on an amusement pier, scuttles off with his fee while the hunters pull the pier apart.