42nd Street (1933) (Movie)

format_quote Ann Lowell: *hiccups* Excuse me. It's the tight shoes.

stars  This film's earliest documented telecast took place in Seattle Saturday 1 June 1957 on KING (Channel 5); it first aired in Portland OR 21 June 1957 on KGW (Channel 8), in Minneapolis 17 July 1957 on KMGM (Channel 9), in Baltimore 11 September 1957 on WJZ (Channel 13), in Philadelphia 13 September 1957 on WFIL (Channel 6), in New Haven CT 27 September 1957 on WNHC (Channel 8), in Altoona PA 11 October 1957 on WFBG (Channel 10), in Phoenix 24 October 1957 on KPHO (Channel 5), in Chicago 26 October 1957 on WBBM (Channel 2), in San Antonio 25 November 1957 on WOAI (Channel 4), in Los Angeles 29 November 1957 on KTTV (Channel 11), and in Honolulu 3 December 1957 on KHVH (Channel 13); in San Francisco it was shown 8 June 1958 on KGO (Channel 7), but New York City television viewers didn't get their first look at it until Sunday 22 November 1959 on WCBS (Channel 2).

stars  The movie's poster was listed #7 in "The 25 Best Movie Posters Ever" by "Premiere" magazine.

stars  The fourth most popular movie at the U.S. box office for 1933.

stars  The groom (Clarence Nordstrom), in the "Shuffle Off To Buffalo" sequence sings to the bride (Ruby Keeler): "I'll go home and get my panties, you'll go home and get your scanties". In the early 1930s, in the US and Europe, the word for the undergarment "panties" was synonymous with "undies" and applied to both men and women.

stars  One of the lines in the song "Shuffle off to Buffalo" is "when she knows as much as we know/she'll be on her way to Reno/while he still has dough." Contemporary audiences would have recognized this as a reference to the fairly common practice of moving to Reno, Nevada, for a short-term stay to obtain a divorce. At the time of the movie's release (and for at least 25 years afterward), Nevada had some of the most lenient divorce laws in the country, especially compared to New York, where there were few accepted grounds for divorce and the standards of proof for those grounds were so high as to be almost impossible (for instance, evidence of adultery had to be in the form of eyewitness testimony or photographic records of the act); and even then, divorces took a year to be final. By contrast, Nevada granted a divorce for almost any reason after only a six-week-residency period.