The earliest film on AFI’s 100 years of Musicals list is 1933’s 42nd Street. Directed by Lloyd Bacon, with choreography by Busby Berkeley, this movie was nominated for the Best Picture Oscar and shows up at #13 on AFI’s list.

While 42nd Street depicts the backstage antics surrounding the production of a Broadway musical, I question whether the film itself should be considered a musical. For over an hour of its running time, the only song-and-dance numbers are a couple of brief rehearsals for the show within the show. Only in its last 20 minutes does the film launch into a full-blown musical number, and that’s the one taking place on the Broadway stage.

Quibbles about its proper genre aside, this is a surprisingly sharp and bawdy film. It was released during Hollywood’s pre-Code era, those few years between the introduction of sound to cinema and the adoption of the restrictive Hays Code. That means you see a whole lot more skin than you’d expect in a Depression-era film, and hear plenty of sexual innuendo.

The movie embraces, or maybe introduces, a host of now-familiar tropes: the ingenue trying to land a role in the titular musical, criss-crossing romantic attachments among the producers and cast, a director badly in need of a hit, a money man with his own ideas of how the show should work.

In the final sequence, Berkeley delivers a brilliant extended routine, combining multiple songs and his signature kaleidoscopic choreography. Today’s SOTD is the middle segment of that finale, and culminates with an “under the legs” tracking shot that the Coen Brothers surely had in mind when they shot their Big Lebowski dream sequence.