42nd Street is brilliant. It is. For one, it's a pre-code delight, oozing with sex and sex and sex (See Ginger Rogers as Anytime Annie. She only said "no" once, and then she didn't hear the question!) It's also, like its Busby Berkeley brother of the same year (Gold Diggers of 1933), a perfect capsule of Depression-era America.

The musical numbers are sensational and, unlike the later Berkeley films, are at least moderately plausible as stage productions. The acting is a mixed bag, as usual; Warner Baxter and Bebe Daniels are great, but poor Ruby Keeler can't act, can't sing, and, frankly, dances like a horse. Here, though, that's part of the fun (she's Peggy, the lowly chorus girl plucked to be a star when the lead can't finish). In the later pictures she's just a drag.

The Berkeley films would also increasingly be comedic, but this one, despite a few laughs, is not a comedy. It's a movie about desperation and poverty and failure and I've seen it at least 20 times. Great film.