42nd Street by Ropes, Bradford - [1933] (c.1932)

New York: Grosset & Dunlap. Very Good. [1933] (c.1932). PhotoPlay Edition. Hardcover. (no dust jacket, but fitted with a custom-cut mylar protective cover) [ex-rental library book but minimally marked as such (a couple of faint stamps of "Butler Block Pharmacy, Lansing, Mich." on front pastedown and verso of ffep, plus a couple of handwritten numbers); a solid book, moderately worn and lightly bumped at several corners, spine cloth faded (author/title in red, still readable), spine slightly turned]. (B&W photographic endpapers) Photoplay Edition (tie-in) for the 1933 Warner Bros. film adaptation, which in turn was adapted into the hit 1980 Broadway show of the same name. The book is illustrated not in the usual fashion of photoplay editions (with stills bound into the text), but in this case by an array of stills on the endpapers -- a total of twelve different scenes (six in the front of the book and six in the back). Although it might seem at first glance as though the novel and the movie cover pretty much the same narrative trajectory -- the blurb in the front of the book describes it as "the story of a musical show from the time of casting to the opening night" -- in fact the book is a good deal rougher than the film in its depiction of the seamier side of showbiz. Aptly described by online critic Scott Miller as "a wild, outrageous, and very adult, pulp potboiler [with] lots of casual sex, lots of drinking, lots of adultery, lots of lies," it's considerably more realistic and less romanticized than the movie, with its melodramatic excess ("You're going out a youngster, but you've got to come back a star!"), informed as it certainly was by the author's own youthful experiences as a vaudeville and nightclub dancer. (It's also worth noting that in the novel, the stage director Julian Marsh and the juvenile lead Billy Lawler (played in the film by Warner Baxter and Dick Powell, respectively) are lovers -- a relationship that was obviously "unsuitable" for the screen, even though the full force of the Motion Picture Production Code wouldn't be brought to bear on Hollywood filmmakers until over a year after this film's release.) Ropes followed this book, his first, with two similarly-themed novels ("Stage Mother," 1933, and "Go Into Your Dance," 1934), before settling into a career as a Hollywood screenwriter of B-movies, often with a musical angle or element (e.g. SWING IN THE SADDLE, SONG OF ARIZONA, MELODY RANCH, etc.). A very scarce book, in any edition. .