Silver Screen Standards: Ruby Keeler in 42nd Street (1933)

Silver Screen Standards: Ruby Keeler in 42^nd Street (1933)

Every time I watch 42^nd Street (1933) I fall in love with Ruby Keeler all over again. Just like Peggy Sawyer, the character she plays in the movie, Keeler was a bright newcomer getting her big break; although she had been dancing on stage since she was barely a teenager, she was a new face in Hollywood, just getting started in films after marrying the much older Al Jolson. In 42^nd Street, she appears in a veritable mob of Hollywood stars, but she still manages to shine brightly enough to attract our attention, even with roguish charmers like Ginger Rogers and Una Merkel hamming it up. She might not be the greatest singer or even the most talented tap dancer, as she herself admitted, but Ruby Keeler is the sweetheart soul of 42^nd Street, the youngster destined to be a star.

Keeler’s character, Peggy, strikes it lucky when she arrives at the casting call for Pretty Lady and makes some important new friends. First, she meets juvenile star Billy Lawler (Dick Powell), who takes a shine to her right away. Experienced chorus girls Ann (Ginger Rogers) and Lorraine (Una Merkel) help Peggy make it through the first cuts, and she eventually lands a spot in the chorus, where she rehearses to exhaustion for obsessive director Julian Marsh (Warner Baxter). Peggy also becomes an accidental participant in the romantic difficulties of vaudeville performer Pat Denning (George Brent), whose former partner and girlfriend Dorothy Brock (Bebe Daniels) has the starring role in Marsh’s show thanks to her current wealthy benefactor (Guy Kibbee). When a drunken Dorothy becomes jealous of Peggy’s friendship with Pat, their confrontation has dramatic consequences for both of them, which culminates in Marsh’s iconic speech, “You’re going out a youngster, but you’ve got to come back a star!”

Along with costar Dick Powell, Keeler represents the plucky but innocent aspect of Depression Era America, a necessary reminder to the downtrodden not to lose hope in spite of widespread suffering. They might seem a bit too saccharine for some modern viewers, but their sweetness is an important part of the mix that makes up the whole of the early 30s Hollywood musical. As a Pre-Code picture, 42^nd Street gets away with plenty of innuendo and exposed female flesh, but Peggy and Billy balance that element with a friendship that grows into chaste romance. Ironically, it’s Billy who is caught in his underwear at their first meeting, a nice counterpoint to the scores of scantily clad chorus girls who appear throughout the picture. Peggy has sexually charged encounters with other men, but neither of them amounts to much. Pat Denning seems drawn to her in spite of his relationship with Dorothy, and Julian Marsh kisses her in order to inspire her to perform a scene properly (also perhaps to mark the character as heterosexual because he was originally depicted as gay in Bradford Ropes’ 1932 novel). With her slim, clean figure and doe-eyed face, Keeler is the quintessential ingénue, but the more experienced characters support and protect her rather than tear her apart. Even Dorothy, the star whose place Peggy takes, shows up to encourage her on opening night. It might seem strange, but it has the same value as the kindness inevitably shown to a Shirley Temple heroine; in a ragged world of poverty and strife, people want to see something untarnished and pure survive. Keeler is so appealing that we understand the other characters’ reaction to her; she radiates a particular kind of star power, a soft but unadulterated light.

Ruby Keeler’s career depended on roles that made the most of that luminous quality, which limited her options, and after her divorce from Al Jolson in 1939 she made very few appearances in films. In the wake of the financial success of 42^nd Street, however, there was a brief wave of great Ruby Keeler musicals: Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933), Footlight Parade (1933), and Dames (1934). All of them costar Dick Powell, with whom Keeler would make seven pictures for Warner Bros. Other members of the cast also return for some of the later productions, including Ginger Rogers, Guy Kibbee, and Ned Sparks, although Footlight Parade is particularly notable for adding James Cagney in a leading role and reuniting Keeler with 42^nd Street director Lloyd Bacon. Each of them offers a similar mix of showbiz life, musical numbers, comedy, and romance. The later Gold Diggers movies, Gold Diggers of 1935 (1935) and Gold Diggers of 1937 (1937), repeat the same formula with Dick Powell continuing to star but Keeler no longer appearing. She made only one movie with Al Jolson, Go into Your Dance (1935), but her other films with Powell include Flirtation Walk (1934), Shipmates Forever (1935), and Colleen (1936). After Sweetheart of the Campus in 1941, Keeler disappeared from the movies; she remarried in 1941 and settled down to raise four children with her second husband, John Homer Lowe, in addition to the son she had adopted while married to Jolson. Her marriage to Jolson ended so badly that Keeler refused to let her name be used in the 1946 biopic, The Jolson Story, which replaces her with a fictionalized character named Julie Benson (played by Evelyn Keyes).

Keeler’s filmography might lack the breadth and depth of Hollywood legends like Bette Davis or Katharine Hepburn, and her early costar Ginger Rogers had a much longer and more varied career, but there’s something about her that always gets to me. Her best musicals from the early 30s are a sure-fire tonic for whatever ails me, and 42^nd Street is the movie that first shared her sweetness and light with the world. She really did come back from that outing a star, and she still shines brightly whenever I make a return trip to the bawdy, gaudy backstage world of 42^nd Street.

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— Jennifer Garlen for Classic Movie Hub

Jennifer Garlen pens our monthly Silver Screen Standards column. You can read all of Jennifer’s Silver Screen Standards articles here.

Jennifer is a former college professor with a PhD in English Literature and a lifelong obsession with film. She writes about classic movies at her blog, Virtual Virago, and presents classic film programs for lifetime learning groups and retirement communities. She’s the author of Beyond Casablanca: 100 Classic Movies Worth Watching and its sequel, Beyond Casablanca II: 101 Classic Movies Worth Watching, and she is also the co-editor of two books about the works of Jim Henson.