42nd Street

“The Remarkable Out-of-Print Book That Inspired '42nd Street'” (Richard Brody, May 6, 2020, The New Yorker)

“42nd Street” rescued the musical genre, which had been done to death in the early days of talking pictures. With three spectacular production numbers, the film captured the first full flowering of Busby Berkeley’s geometrical and symbolic, and macabre and erotic, imagination. But for the bulk of the movie, “42nd Street” is a dramatic comedy of backstage life, chronicling the making of a Broadway musical called “Pretty Lady.” “42nd Street,” which was released in 1933, is a Depression story... 

based on a novel by Bradford Ropes, published in 1932, and long out of print. It has apparently never been reprinted: I stumbled upon a cheap copy at the Strand three years ago, but other copies sell on eBay for four hundred and ninety-nine dollars and more... 

Though the novel is satisfyingly plotted and page-turningly suspenseful, Ropes’s sense of prose ranges from awkward to purple, his sense of psychology is simple, and his view of context and power of analysis are stunted. Nonetheless, the book is fascinating, because it reads less like a novel than like a documentary about the lives of New York’s theatre people and, above all, about the practicalities, the personalities, and the sexual politics that go into the making of a show. In the sharpness of its incidents and the variety of its copious dialogue, it brings the era and the milieu to life in a way that no movie I’ve ever watched and no nonfiction account I’ve ever read has done; it the ring of authenticity, the force of direct observation and conversation....”